Will linking individual words within my content help or hinder my SEO Ranking?

Question

I am trying to improve my SEO Ranking, will linking my content to other pages on the site hinder or help my results. For instance if I was to link back to the home page every time I mentioned the company name.

Example

The frog was almost the size of a <a href="toadinfo.html">toad</a>. <a href="toadinfo.html">Toads</a> are larger than frogs. My <a href="toadinfo.html">toad</a> has green spots

Answer 1

Linking between pages is important for two reasons. First it gives the crawlers a good understanding of what pages exists in your site and second it passes the page rank that exists on some of your pages around to other pages. This is actually a fairly complex issue. Here are a couple of things to consider:

1. If you have a page with page rank, the page rank will be divided among all links in on that page and passed on through all links that do not have the no-follow tag. However, it is a 100% transfer so if your page has a PR of 5 and you have 5 total links and none have the no-follow tag, each page linked to will receive less that 1 PR (there is a modifier, we don't know what it exactly, just that it reduces flow through juice). Google does this to stop circular linking and other Black Hat tricks.
2. The anchor text within your links, even internally, are very important in that it they tell Google what the page being linked to is about. So if you use the word "here" Google won't understand as well what the page is about but if every link within your site to your home page has the anchor text "frog" and the page linked to is about frogs Google will consider that page from Frog searches (obviously there are many factors as to how well the page will rank). With that in mind if you home page is about Green Frogs or Brazilian Frogs then it is even better to use that as your anchor text.
3. While it may sound corny Google always tries to state that doing what is best for the user will help SEO. In this case that is completely true. Having links that with clear anchor text is extremely useful to the user and to your ranking with Google.

Answer 2

To the extent that the links are useful, it might help Google to understand the keywords relevant to the page you are linking to. If you overdo it though, you certainly risk being penalized.

So how do you know if you are overdoing it? Well, ultimately you can't. But if you do it in a way that makes the links useful rather than simply for SEO purposes you are probably safe.

Answer 3

The answer is "it depends"

What you are employing is an ok tactic and it will help a little... The problem is:

a) it is within your own website so the impact will not be that great in the grand scheme of things b) if you do it too much fr a single word, you can "spam" yourself out of the rankings...

Just do it where it is relevant and makes sense...