Strengthening Internal Website Links: Hub and Spoke Strategy

I am not the first person to talk about the “Hub and Spoke” SEO strategy within a website. But I am talking about it because this strategy is something tangible that you can do within your website that will, over time, give you good SEO page ranking results; attract more people to your website organically.

First of all, if you were to take a look at the Google Webmaster Toolkit’s “Search Console”, you would see under the heading “Search Traffic” a subheading titled “Internal Links”. By clicking on this subheading of your website, you will see how Google is currently looking at your website with respect to the internal links present on your site. For most sites, the most visited page with the most internal links is usually the home page.

So what can we conclude from seeing this in Google Search Console?

1. Internal links are important enough to Google that they track this information within their search engine.

2. Since this information is apparently important enough for Google to track, there has to be a reason why it’s important for them to do so. Once you think this thought through to its logical conclusion, you’ll soon realize that the “Googlebot” web crawler is tracking these links to find out which pages of your website are the most important – these are your top “authority” pages. on your site. . When Google knows what these pages are on your site, these are the pages that they will mostly be on, sending traffic to organically; they will be the pages on your site that get the most attention and will organically become the top “entry points” into your business from the Google search engine.

Now let’s start thinking about setting up your site strategically. Where do you want Google to primarily direct people within your site? What are the best pages for your business that you want people to see first? Once you figure this out, you can start building and/or rebuilding your website and its pages to improve the visibility of your key web pages in the eyes of Google. Over time, these pages will get Google’s attention and become the strongest Google search engine ranking pages on your site, and it’s important to always remember in the back of your mind that you’re not trying to rank. your entire website for Google, you are trying to rank your most important web pages for the Google search engine.

This is where the “Hub and Spoke” strategy comes into play. Is that how it works.

Let’s say you’re running a blog site. If you’re just writing individual blog posts and none of them relate to each other, they’ll never get true organic SEO strength in the eyes of Google, unless you’re very lucky in the uniqueness of your content and keyword search phrases. . Since you’re competing against millions of pages, this kind of luck is extremely hard to come by.

Now let’s say you write some content on a blog that is important and you want the world to see it. What you want to do is create a post/web page that can be segmented and published to multiple pages. Each support page would discuss one aspect of the content, perhaps a breakdown of a subtopic or something, and place links that would take you back to the main blog post/web page and possibly links to one or more of the others. support pages too.

All child posts/pages would link to the parent post page and also link to each other. The important point here is that Google is now beginning to view all of your content on a particular topic as more comprehensive, providing a comprehensive response within a content niche across a series of pages with one page being the obvious front page to where everyone connects. This becomes your “Authority” page over time in the eyes of Google, as people visit your site through all of these pages and most clicks on internal site links ultimately lead people to your site. authority page for that main content starting point. This page will start to rank well for you.

So now let’s expand this concept even further. Start duplicating this throughout your site, interconnecting various “hubs” and “spokes”. Ultimately, it will resemble a spider web with a series of interconnected radial pages linking together a series of hubs that revolve around a central business theme, or business niche, and your site begins to become an “authority” site. within a business. niche in the eyes of Google and as a result, you will start to see exponential growth in organic traffic over time to your site.

Every core web page on your site will eventually rank well for certain keyword phrases, and as a result, your website will gain an additional level of overall niche SEO authority, bringing you even more traffic over time.

So don’t overlook the internal link building aspect when building your website and pages. A little bit of strategic planning in your internal design will go a long way from an SEO perspective. Now you know why it takes time to rank well and build site authority, but at least now you also know part of the equation to get there.