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With more people in the SEO community emphasizing the value of good internal linking these days, it’s easy to fall into the “it’s all about architecture” rut and forget that internal linking goes well beyond what you put into your primary and secondary navigation lists.

Here are three types of internal links you should be using on your Web sites. These linking styles work for virtually every kind of Web site, including ecommerce, blogs, and traditional static HTML sites.

1: Promotional Banner Ad
You may think banner ads are dinosaurs but when it comes to promoting your own content within your site, a well-designed banner ad helps increase user page conversions (a “page conversion” occurs whenever a visitor moves from one page to another within your site).

You can use simple banners or complex banners. Find where your comfort level is.

Each banner should be clearly branded, so that you identify your own content to your visitors.

Rotate your banners. You can use Javascript to do this, but some people prefer CGI.

You can track your banner conversions and use the data to improve your design and placement.

Include a visual aspect with your banner copy: a picture, a smiley, clip art — something that catches the visitor’s eye and which is relevant to the destination page.

2: Pull Quote Links
I learned to call these “floaters” in college but most people in the news and publishing industry probably call them “lift out quotes” or “pull quotes”. People don’t use floaters in their Web copy as much as they used to but floater links work very well. A “pull quote” is a block of copy you insert into your normal copy, using it to highlight a section of the article to attract reader interest (and to break up long articles that lack sufficient images and graphics). The pull quote is often demarcated by lines or fancy quotation marks. Horizontal rules work well for this, depending on how you have structured your HTML. You may have to use little images for the lines. Rather than fight with this blog’s CSS, I’ll use hard-coded underscores:

There are variations on this technique. For example, if you include someone’s picture with the link and position the link block at the side or front of a block of copy, it’s a Mug Shot Link or Pork Chop Link.

3: Kicker Links
Through the years many people have asked in SEO forums if they’ll get any advantage by embedding their links in Hx tags. I don’t know of any advantage, although I’ve experimented with such links just to see what mostly.

Mostly they just look ugly.

But you may not be aware of the kicker. This is a small headline, usually underlined, that appears just above the headline of an article. The font is small, not microscopic. The text as has to be human-readable (and I mean readable with the use of magnifying glasses or microscopes). Don’t make the visitor struggle to see what is in your kicker, but you can use it to link to other content on your site that is relevant to all or some portion of your page copy.

Example:

You want to create credible links in your copy

How To Create Good Links People Click Through

If this were a real article about creating good links that people click through, it would provide you with information and suggestions on how to style, position, and use internal links to help increase page conversions in your copy.

Another variation on kicker links would be kernel links. A kernel is a brief statement or abstract summarizing an article, usually placed at the top of the article.

Final Word
This is not about being sneaky. If you’re even tempted to use one of these techniques to hide links, you’re doing it wrong. You want to leverage these ideas to make your copy more interesting and to inform your visitors of other content on your site that is relevant to whatever they find. It may be that they are really looking for the other article anyway. You never know.

The point is that you don’t have to limit your internal linking to navigation and cross-promotional links embedded in your page copy. You can be creative and informative together, and that makes your site more interesting to everyone.

And you may have noticed that I cheated on the pull quote link — it links to the SEO Glossary at SEO Theory. There is no reason why you have to limit these kinds of links to just the site that hosts them; they are clearly flexible linking mechanisms. Just make sure you don’t confuse your readers (too much).