I often have conversations with clients about the importance of good internal linking and anchor text, and recently I saw a great example of the power of both these things.

RV World sell a variety of parts and accessories into the motorhome, caravan and RV markets. They have a great site which already ranks pretty well across the range of products they sell, but they had one line they really wanted to do better for, air heaters.

One of the things that they have done really well is use their blog to add lots of deep content to the site, blogging about products, providing how-to type content, product comparisons and generally offering deeper content than your average ecommerce store. All great stuff, and sure enough one of their blog posts providing excellent information about the different types of air heater was ranking on page one for the term “air heaters”. A good result, but what they really wanted is to rank highly for that term with their Air Heaters product category page. And thinking about the intent of that particular query, the category page is arguably a better result.

One of the things they didn’t do orginally was include any links from the blog post through to the category page or any of the pages for specific products mentioned. They have since added these, and the impact was almost immediate. The additional link from the blog post using the anchor text “air heaters” has pushed the category page to no. 3 behind only Wikipedia.

Of course without controlling for any other changes (and looking more deeply at changes in the backlink profile) we can’t be sure that there were not other things causing this. All things considered though I am sure the changes to the blog post are what did it. The post itself was originally ranking page one (around 5-6) for that term, eventhough it wasn’t particularly optimized for that phrase. Adding a link to the category page with that specific anchor text increased the internal link popularity of the category page as well as providing another clear signal that this was the page which really addresses that query.

The takeaway from this example? In my opinion there are two lessons here:

• That blogging is a great way to add depth to the content on an ecommerce site. There is always lots of write about…just ask yourself what are the questions that your customers routinely ask and address those. Thinking about product comparisons, how-to guides and anything that would be of interest to a user of your product. Mixing up the media is always a good idea too…video is great (and should be the subject of a future blog post).
• That you should pay attention to the way your cross link pages on your site. Anchor text is important in primary navaigation, and this is normally baked into the CMS, but don’t overlook opportunities to cross link pages from other relevant content, blog posts, FAQs, how-to’s etc. Embedding contentually rich links in editorial is the best way to provide Google with signals about the content of the page you are linking to.