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I had an interesting meeting today with a potential client who was wondering why part of their site wasn’t performing as well as it should have been.

Additionally, they had a sub domain that was getting no traffic or rankings despite being online for over a year.

In this article, I show some of the mistakes they made so that you know what you can do to ensure that your site reaches its potential in the search engines.

Here’s the scenario:  A fairly well known technology firm in my area that has been doing business since the 90’s and has had a web presence since about 1998 can’t seem to figure out why their site isn’t performing well in the search engines.  Aside from 3 or 4 high rankings for some moderately competitive terms, they are nowhere to be found.

In order to sell them on my services I had to do a little research into their issues.  However, it didn’t take too long to figure out what the problem is.  They have tons of great content on both the main site and the sub domain, but it wasn’t getting crawled very often, if at all.  Even when they instituted a Google Sitemap they said they saw a moderate increase in spider activity but nothing too substantial.

Upon my brief investigation, I found that the issue with their sites had to do with interlinking within the site.  You see, in many cases, some of the pages were dead ends.  There was no immediate path back to the home page, or even a parent page of the site.  It was as if each page was an orphan.

There had been no relationships defined between areas of content on the site, therefore there was no way for the crawlers to better understand the site.

It was even more apparent when one tries to browse the site as a customer.  In more cases than I can count, there are pages where the visitor has to use their back button due to the fact that there is no internal site navigation.

It’s one of those things that, at first glance, seems simple enough, but to them it was an incredible find.  You see, part of their problem with this whole issue is that a) they’re too familiar with the site and, b) the harder they looked at it the more the problem and solution escaped them.  They knew there was something wrong yet they couldn’t put their fingers on it.

It’s kind of like when you know someone’s name, because you’ve met them before, but can’t quite remember it.  We’ve all been there.  The name is right on the tip of your tongue yet the harder you think about it the further away it gets.

This was their problem – because of their familiarity with the site they couldn’t see the issue.

So, part of my work with them will be to help reconstruct their internal navigation so that it is more appealing to search engine crawlers and customers alike.  The goal is to increase interlinking between related pages as well as improve the number of links pointing to the home page.

That is an important point to make – that all links, even internal, do contribute to your site’s overall link popularity.  Granted, it would probably take hundreds or thousands of internal links to equal the value of one good external backlink, but my point is that any incoming link is a good link, even if it’s from your own site.

As for the sub domain, it’s the same issue.  All the links on it were pointing back to the main domain, but there were zero links, either internal or external, pointing to the sub domain.  In essence, the sub domain did not exist because there was no way to get to it.

How I found that out was simple:  The client typed in the sub domain to show it to me and how it worked; then we went to the main domain.  When I said “show me the sub domain again” he started to type in the URL in the address bar again.  I stopped him and said “wait, I want to see you navigate to it from here.” But he couldn’t do it.

They had set up this great sub domain full of useful information, yet they provided no way for the spider to access it.  The first thing I’m going to do is get a link to the sub domain in the footer of the home page and then watch the crawlers go crazy on it.  All because of a single, well placed link.

So, if you are wondering why your site may not be performing as well as it could, may I suggest you revisit your internal navigation?  Try and use your site as your customers do – is it easy enough to get around on?  Can you get from the home page to a deep content page quickly and easily?  How about navigating in the other direction – can you navigate from a deep page to a shallow page or the home page easily?  If not, I’ll bet the search engine crawlers can’t either which is no doubt affecting your search engine rankings.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article