When it comes to on-page optimization, many website owners overlook the importance of internal links.
Did you realise that those insignificant internal links can boost your web pages’ keyword rankings? The SEO performance of your site as a whole can be greatly improved by focusing solely on internal link creation.
When do we use internal links?
When you create links to other pages on your site, you are engaging in internal linking.
Internal links (as opposed to external links, also known as outlinks) prevent visitors from leaving your site. They are not to be confused with inbound links, which are links on external domains that lead directly to your site.
Your website’s architecture also includes its internal linking structure. Your website’s internal linking profile is the framework of a pyramid with your homepage at its peak.
Any section of your site should be accessible in no more than three clicks.
One of the foundations of search engine optimisation is internal linking, which shows search engines which pages on your site are the most, second most, and least significant.
Buttons, clickable pictures, and anchor text—the text within a hyperlink that may be clicked on—are all used to generate internal links within a website.
Anchor text that includes a page’s target keyword helps boost that page’s search engine optimisation value.
Internal Linking Structures and Examples
You probably already have a variety of internal link kinds implemented on your site. The differences between the two are significant and should be understood because of the impact they play in the user experience of your website.
Menus and Links to Other Pages
Your website’s principal navigation links are the most crucial ones.
These should remain in your website’s header permanently to show users where they stand in the site’s organisational structure. Typical structures are based on product lines, major services, or central themes.
Footer
Footer links, like navigation links, are consistent throughout all of your site’s pages.
The links you put there should take the user to additional pages they could find useful. You want the internal links in the footer to help the user locate another place to click if they haven’t found what they’re looking for on the page.
Excursus
The navigational links in the sidebar are typically contextual links.
Some websites may have a navigation bar on the side that contains links to other sections of the site. Websites with a lot of content, such as news or recipe sites, often employ sidebar links because visitors may be browsing rather than searching for a specific topic.
Contextual
In-text links are clickable anchor text within an article’s main text. They are frequently used in online writing.
Internal links within the text itself direct the user to the desired information without any emphasis or navigational cues.
Why should we bother with link-building within our own organisation?
There are many advantages to linking within your own website’s pages. Let’s take a look at how using them can boost your SEO techniques.
Enhances satisfaction of use
Primarily, adding useful internal links makes your site more enjoyable for visitors. This is especially true for first-time visitors who are coming to your website with no context for the information found there.
Keeping the user experience favourable by making it easy for them to traverse your web pages and locate what they’re looking for fast increases the user journey.
Holds on to visitors over extended periods of time
Users are less likely to go to another website or utilise a search engine again if they can find what they need quickly and easily through internal links.
This will lead to increased page views and longer session lengths. If your calls to action and other conversion steps are optimized, that longer time on page can also enhance the likelihood that a user will convert.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) perks of internal linking
Internal links have a dual purpose: they lead people around your site while also guiding search engine crawlers to every page you have.
Web crawlers learn more about your site’s content as they navigate it, which affects how likely they are to be promoted in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Therefore, your SEO results may greatly profit from your strategic use of internal links.
Facilitates Google’s indexing and discovery of fresh content
You should aim to have no more than three clicks between the homepage and any other page on your site. Without an internal connection, Google’s spiders will never find your page.
The first step in increasing your website’s visibility on the SERP is to ensure that the pages you wish to rank are easily discoverable by search engine crawlers and, thus, crawled and indexed.
Give a sense of context and importance
Google also uses the anchor text of internal links to determine the importance and context of certain words and phrases.
Google will be less likely to favourably rank a page for relevant keyword phrases if the anchor text does not make sense in the context of the linked page’s content.
However, if you use descriptive anchor text, Google will have a better idea of the content of the linked website.
Share your PageRank
We also use internal links to spread PageRank among our domains.
PageRank is an algorithm developed by Google that estimates a page’s importance based on the number of incoming links.
When one page links to another, it shares some of its PageRank with the linked-to page.