Upon reading one of my articles on backlink building a reader requested a more detailed article on this strategy which is what follows.
It should be noted that this is just one of many link building strategies. When it comes to links internal to your site it offers huge advantage over other strategies.
What this article will not be dealing with.
- External Link Building Strategies
- Creating Internal Anchor Text Power
- Advantages of Outgoing Links
All those strategies and more are extremely powerful and would be available from me direct as part of the coaching I offer for purposes of high powered marketing strategies.
That said, let’s get into…
Internal Tiered Link Wheel Definitions
First, let’s break those words down.
Internal: means that they are inside your site as opposed to outside your web property like external links whether incoming or outgoing would be.
Tiered: think of a wedding cake and the tiers that it has which makes up its elaborate display. Each piece is in and of itself a cake, but then the whole work of art brought together creates a masterpiece.
Link: These are what make up the web. Also, known as hyperlinks. They take people from point A to point B.
Wheel: Just as a wheel on your automobile is in a shape that will complete itself so is what this concept brings to the table. There is no start or finish, but rather the wheel simply exists.
NOTE: I use WordPress within this design though this could be done with any platform including hardcode HTML. However, my examples and references will be pulled from the WordPress platform. If you are working with a different platform, simply take the concepts with you into the new location.
Digging Deeper into Internal Links
Let’s say I want to share what Wikipedia says about backlinks. That would be an outgoing external link rather than internal.
Let’s say that someone reads this article and wants to link to it from there article about backlinks. The would be an incoming external link rather than internal.
Internal links are within your own property.
With WordPress people, can create posts (what your blog roll lives on) or pages (a more static environment like a Website). There are excellent strategies to follow even within this part of the equation but for purposes of this article we are talking about internal links.
- A post can link to a page.
- A page can link to a post.
- A post can link to a post.
- A page can link to a page.
I believe I covered all ways you can link with the above options mentioned. Simply put an internal link takes you from one property and moves you forward to another with both properties being internal to your site.
NOTE: Your site being 1 site. If you have 2 sites and link from one to the other that would be an external link building activity even though they are both internally owned by you.
A Word About Images and Links
Your internal link does not have to, but often is built on targeted text.
Example: This text would be linked
However, you can link an image as a hyperlink too. You would just set the link from one internal location to another within the image rather than text.
While I will not be going into detail on that point here, knowing that the option is available does position you in a place of power when creating your link building strategy.
Understanding Tiered Links
Since this is the easier part I thought to get it out of the way next. Please remember or reference the wedding cake example above as you dig into this section of the article.
Within your blog, I set this up as a double tier strategy which means there are two levels.
The top level consists of those pages which you want everyone to find. While I’m pleased that you are reading and hopefully enjoying this article it is not the main event that I offer.
The three services that I absolutely want everyone to know about revolve around my offerings as they relate to:
- Writing / Authoring
- Coaching / Mentoring
- Virtual / Live Speaking
Those are considered the core pages of everything that I am doing.
We can let Google know about this by the number of links that point to each of these pages. As Google finds more internal links pointing to those pages they will correspondingly rank you in better and better positions within their organic ranking results.
Given that these are core properties of your site I make sure that they are pages. Pages are considered the foundation. (Tier 1)
Then as I create the posts each of the posts links strategically to the pages that have been established. (Tier 2)
We will return to this concept in a moment. Let’s now move to the wheel concept.
Understanding Wheeled Links
For some reason, this concept confuses people more than anything else. It really shouldn’t. Remember, we are just linking posts from point A to point B.
We are creating a wheel.
NOTE: Avoid doing this externally as it can be dangerous and Google doesn’t like it. However, when you do this internally it is an entirely different matter.
Here is a visual of what this process would look like:
- Post 1 links to Post 2
- Post 2 links to Post 3
- Post 3 links to Post 4
- Post 4 links to Post 5
- Post 5 links to Post 1
Up until the very last post you are simply creating an internal link from one property to the next.
#5 throws a monkey wrench into the entire event. While it to is only linking from one post to the next it is also completing the wheel by linking back to post 1.
A Word About Categories
Let’s say I’m planting a garden. We would have:
- Brussel Sprouts
- Beets
- Broccoli
We could put everything in the exact same place within the garden and have a mess. Or we could put them in their own place for growing purposes within the garden and create organization.
Their own category.
You can do the same things with your posts. If you have 5 articles on beets and 7 on broccoli. Create two categories and make sure that each piece of content is in the right place.
The actual process of creating these categories will not be covered here. However, it is from these categories that I create the wheel structure that is referenced above.
Organizational Work Chart
Continuing with our example we have:
- 5 articles for beets.
- 7 articles for broccoli.
We wouldn’t want to combine the beet and broccoli articles any more than we would want to do it within the garden. Instead keep them in their separate categories.
From that point I typically look for sets of 5 to work from.
HOT TIP: To keep track of the links I will create a private file in WordPress and when new content is created make sure that the link is correspondingly added. If someone somehow finds this page, I don’t sweat it. They must make heads and tails out of what is going on within the content.
Let’s laser target down to the beets category.
Category: Beets
- Post 1
- Post 2
- Post 3
- Post 4
- Post 5
We are now going to setup the wheel.
- Post 1 links to Post 2
- Post 2 links to Post 3
- Post 3 links to Post 4
- Post 4 links to Post 5
We should be good so far. Here’s the one that seems to mess everyone up.
- Post 5 links to Post 1
That’s it.
You’re done.
Connecting the Dots
It’s now time to put the two strategies together so we have a far stronger internal link structure than most all your other competitors.
First, we pull the links that we built as pages (your top tier) and add them to this sheet that we have created for the wheel links. I will notate them on the sheet by calling them tier 1 links. I recommend that there be no less than 3 of these properties and no more than 5. On this site, I am only using 3.
Tier 1:
- Writing / Authoring
- Coaching / Mentoring
- Virtual / Live Speaking
If I have created the categories correctly I will have links that I want to point to these 3 pages. Since our vegetable garden won’t work here, let’s create 3 new categories. These are the tier 2 properties.
Tier 2:
- Social Media
- Search Engine Optimization
- Pay Per Click
No matter how many posts are in any one of these categories they will have a link included which points to one of the tier one pages in a rotational process.
Let’s say I have 5 articles in the category of social media that I want to link to the tier 1 properties. That would look like this.
- First tier 2 post links to first page of tier 1
- Second tier 2 post links to second page of tier 1
- Third tier 2 post links to third page of tier 1
Fine so far… this is where it might seem complicated.
- Fourth tier 2 post links to first page of tier 1
- Fifth tier 2 post links to second page of tier 1
See how the tier 2 structure simply rotated back to the first and second options on tier 1?
HOT TIP: To keep everything balanced I typically note where I left off with the last tier 1 rotation and start with that link the next time I have a set of 5 links that are ready to go through the tier building process.
Concluding Thoughts About Creating Tiered Link Wheels
Now you have it.
The exact process for putting together tiered link wheels internally.
WARNING: Do not attempt to do this externally. Google will not reward you for it. Internally, is quite another matter.
It should be noted that there are key ingredients that have not been discussed as it relates to this topic as they do not directly involve the setup of the actual tiered link wheels. One of the major one’s that come to mind is how to handle anchor text for your best advantage.
I do offer coaching services where we can get into those details and others including establishing keywords, optimizing content, social media marketing and more.
However, as it relates to the topic of internal tiered link wheel building, what questions do you have?
Please leave those along with your thoughts, opinions and ideas in the comments below and lets connect the Web.
Guy Siverson
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Helpful information. I use links to connect my pages/posts to other pages/posts in my website, but I had never thought of doing in in such a structured, planned way. It makes a lot of sense that Google will not dislike this (as with external backlinks) because after all you’re remaining on your website. And you have some pages/posts that rank better than other, you can use the ranking power of the former to improve the number of visitors on the latter as well. I think I’ll read your article again a couple of times, so many important concepts that I really wanna get straight. Thanks for publishing this.
I’m really pleased you enjoyed it. May my internal linking strategy bring you to the top of all your search terms on the Web.
Wow! I just thought about restructuring my entire blog! Thanks for this very useful information. I like the idea about the Tiers and how pointing to the pages from blog posts can help with SEO. It makes complete sense to set things up this way.
I am wondering about categories though-should you only ever have a blog post that links to one category? It makes sense not to mix ‘beets’ and ‘broccoli’, but what if your blog post could relate to a couple of categories?Am I hurting my SEO if I have done this? Thanks!
Glad you liked it.
It does take a bit more work to do, but at the end of the day, and when the results from Google are in, it will be more than worth the time investment that was made.
Hey man thanks for the post this is pretty cool, I’m ready to go back to all my posts and pages and starting linking.
I get where you’re going with wheeled links, but I’ve heard before that we should not do infinite loops since it confuses the crawlers.
Like post 1 links to post 2 and post 2 links back to post 1.
Or is it ok as long as the chain is longer?
What you are describing above is reciprocal linking. Notice that the one post never links back to the first. Even if we broke this down to a set of 3 posts it would look like this:
1 to 2
2 to 3
3 to 1
Notice how none of them link back to the other article. This makes these all 1 way links.
Where people get into trouble with this is externally not internally. Google wants us to be able to build internal power but very naturally.
Given that each of these posts are within the same category that is one natural component. Beyond that if you create the anchor texts the way I teach you will never have the same keyword phrase on any one page.
Google loves this sort of thing.
Hello again Guy,
I know of internal and external link building but Wheel and Tiered are entirely new things to me, awesome skills you’ve covered here!
That means for the wheel link building, it’s best if we do tutorials, right? For example, six different posts covering a certain topic and at the last link, I put a link to connect it back to the first post. That’s healthy right?
Also, for the tiered page, is it similar to writing a main review of your product and creating pots to add links back to the main page? So if I were to have one hundred posts and I connect them to my main review page, does Google frown upon that action? This has got me thinking for quite a while though, pretty curious to know 😀
Tutorials would work but the articles don’t need to relate that closely. With the power of categories you can know which one’s to work with on a category by category basis. Then it is just a matter of weaving the words for the other page into your pros that you have written on the first page. This becomes easier if the different articles do relate in some way but it is not necessary.
As it relates to pointing the energy at the main pages, Google knows that every site has its primary pages. When you tell Google exactly what those pages are by using the tiered method they will respond accordingly by major rankings to those pages. Once they are in the sweet spot that you are looking for you can choose to move onto other pages or not. Remember, the pages are more static and not blog pieces like the posts would be. Having to many of these just makes things more confusing.
This seems like it could be a great stratedgy. I’ve been using the internal link strategy for my posts but I never thought to do it in such an organized & strategic way. I am considering implementing this strategy on all my links however before I put in all that work I have a question. Would it really make that much of a difference in my posts rankings to do it this way versus the way I do it now. I basically just link to other posts on my site that are related to the topic of the post I’m working on. I try to make sure that all my posts have internal links but It’s certainly not tiered or a wheel. I just want to make sure it would be worth all that effort before I do it.
Hello Bill
This is a long-term investment process. Will it make a difference? No question about it. Is it a time investment? Absolutely.
I’ve had blogs with and without this strategy. Whenever I do with it works out better for me.