Maximize Traffic with Internal Links

At the risk of repeating myself, a user-friendly navbar is critical, and it has a lot to do with maximizing traffic. Every page should have a link to your home page, and for an e-commerce site, a link to the ordering page as well. Content-driven sites, however, should have much more. Related content areas should be connected by internal links - as many as you can manage.

The ability to link related content is one of the greatest strengths of the Web, so leverage this to full advantage to keep people on your site. Of course, you already have a navbar on every page that lists all the main sections of your site, and perhaps you even have a few sectional navbars, each of which appears in only one section, and has links to other content related to that section. But the more specific you can make your internal links, the more likely they are to be useful (and used).

The finer points of internal linking are mainly of interest for sites that have a lot of pages of content, or that sell a lot of different products. Internal linking schemes range from the simple to the incredibly complex. First of all, be sure to include internal crosslinks in body text wherever appropriate. For some sites, it may also be worthwhile to have a list of related content that appears at the end of a page, on a sidebar, or wherever.

At the simplest level, you can simply hard-code links to related content. As a site becomes larger, however, this can get hard to maintain. The links may need to be revised as new content is added or old content removed, and careless coders may introduce inconsistencies in type styles and such. For these reasons, you may feel the need to move up to some sort of dynamic solution.

Over at The Web Developer's Journal, we use SSI (server-side include) scripts to include fitting lists of related articles. This is very convenient, but unfortunately costly in terms of page-load time. See my recent article on Content Management Tips and Tricks to learn how to implement semi-dynamic features like this.

Dynamic environments like ASP or Cold Fusion give you various ways to create appropriate links to related content, as of course do high-end content management systems such as Story Server or BroadVision. Some ecommerce packages such as Microsoft Merchant Server include ways to include "premiums" or "special offers," which can be used to guide visitors to related content. Buying a plane ticket to Boston? How about buying a guide book, too?

The ultimate goal, which make marketers slaver and privacy advocates cringe, is to be able to serve up links to related content based on information about the visitors themselves. A certain amount of info about your visitors can be gleaned on the fly, including what browser version and OS they're using, and where they're coming from (or at least, where their ISP is located). Some of the high-end banner ad management software (see Ad Management Software Roundup for a comprehensive, if now somewhat dated, list) can use this information to target ads to specific visitors. With a little imagination, this can be used for content management - simply create appropriate internal links and set them up as "ads."

More personal information could conceivably be gleaned from reader surveys (does anyone really fill out those things?) and used to show visitors targeted content. There have even been various attempts to build databases of such information that are available across multiple sites, such as Engage. Personally, I don't look forward to the day when everyone's age, sex and favorite flavor of ice cream are available to everyone else, but I fear it will come sooner or later.

Keep in mind that the more complicated a solution is, and (paradoxically), the more expensive the software used to implement it, the less likely it is to work properly. The "high-end" banner ad and content management packages mentioned above have their share of problems, as a couple of recent case studies ( Electronic Commerce Tutorial, ColdFusion Problems ) have pointed out. As in many aspects of Web development, "keep it simple" is usually a wise policy.

Navigation and the Search Engines
Build Traffic Through Good Site Design
Build Traffic Through Good Site Design - Conclusion