Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks! I figured today I would give you a break from the normal song and dance to talk about something which is less work but can still be very effective at increasing rank and thanks internal linking.
So anytime we talk about internal linking we have to talk about Wikipedia.org because in the search engine world its a veritable monster. If you would have asked me 5 years ago why Wikipedia ranked as well as it does I probably would have scratched my head. Today I can say with confidence its because of 2 things:
1. They have TONS of pages out there targeting long tail terms and those pages are SEO’ed for those terms
2. They have a very good navigational structure and TOP NOTCH internal linking
You don’t think there are hundreds of people on the Wiki staff working on getting backlinks do you…my guess is no. They build authority across the site by ranking lots of pages for non-competitive terms and push that authority through the site with internal linking. The catch of course is that they are very smart with their internal linking and do it in such a way which IMPROVES RANK!