There are numerous SEO techniques, and field experts follow them with utmost priority, but there is one technique that they seem to heed less attention to and that is internal linking.
This technique falls under the umbrella of on-page optimisation and it’s just as necessary as any other technique on-page comprises of.
If your website is rich in internal linking, it will experience an increase in session duration with more pages within a session, the bounce rates will consistently reduce, and your website will get organically ranked. Thus boosting your website’s SEO.
By reading this article, you’ll know why internal linking is necessary for your website to boost it’s engagement and SEO.
But before we begin…
What is Internal Linking?
It is not that complicated to understand.
Any page on your website that links to another webpage of the same website is called an internal link.
The above image portrays the standard internal linking structure of ecommerce websites.
There’s a homepage, where there are categories which are further divided into other subcategories, which link to the products.
But not every website does eCommerce, right?
So, what about the other websites?
They have the same structure up until categories but their comprising posts are interlinked with each other (relevantly).
The best example for an internal linking website is Wikipedia.org
Just see how many webpages under the same domain they have internally linked to.
But you don’t have to overdo it, limiting the number of links will actually work in your favour as having too many links can be seen as being spammy.
Internal linking works well for Wikipedia because it’s an educational website.
So, this is basically what internal linking is. But how can it boost SEO?
Let’s talk about the advantages of internal linking in boosting a website’s SEO.
Internal Linking Helps Spiders To Crawl and Index Your Web Pages Faster
The one thing that scares SEO experts all over the world is the GoogleBot Crawler/Spider.
If you want your website to get indexed -ranking comes later- you have to create content which is permissible by the spider.
The crawler analyzes every piece of content on the internet and it crawls them link by link.
Every time the spider crawls, it is looking for fresh content so if you have no internal links to new pieces of content, then it will take longer for the spider to finally acknowledge it.
So, it’s necessary to ensure plenty of internal links between pieces of content to increase the speed of the crawling process – when the spider crawls one page and finds a link to another one then it starts crawling those interlinked pages.
This can help your content get indexed sooner rather than later.
Internal Linking Brings Structure To Your Website & Enhances User Experience
While you’re optimising your website with proper internal linking to make the spider crawl your pages faster you’re providing a structure to your website.
You’re dividing your content on the basis of categories, with this you are making it easier for your users to locate what they are looking for.
But wait there’s more…
Let’s say, users have accessed an SEO section of your website and there you have briefed them about LSI keywords, they become interested in knowing more about it and click on an hyperlink which links to another internal web page titled “Eight Excellent Sites To Check Keyword Ranking”.
To further learn, your visitors didn’t have to go back to Google and search for their query. Hence, reducing your website’s bounce rate and increasing the session time.
Plus, if your visitors have not already subscribed to your blog or shared your content, with this experience there’s a higher chance that they will.
3. Internal Linking Can Make Your Deep Linked Pages Gain Recognition
Have you ever wondered where most of your backlinks land?
Here’s the data.
Most of the backlinks are landing on either the logo (homepage), or the privacy section of your website.
There may be nothing special about these internally linked pages, they’re likely not even in the top 10 pages of your website.
However, after you have brought structure to your website, even if most of the pages are linked to your homepage, visitors will be able to locate what they are looking for and within your inter linking spree they will more likely be able to find your deep linked pages as well.
Things To Remember
- Link To Pages Filled With Content
Try and link to pages that are filled with content, this makes your internal linking structure strong.Posts filled with content that already hold a lot of internal links are great to link to from a new post as you’ll build upon your stronghold of links. - Optimum Usage Of Anchor Text
Are you familiar with anchor text?If not, anchor text is the coloured and/or underlined text in an article where you click, which directs you to another page.
You need to keep it as descriptive as possible, you cannot just include it irrelevantly because that will have the opposite intended effect.
Let’s say, I want to link to a talk about anchor text optimisation. I won’t just include it like this:
-Are your Anchor texts optimised?
Rather, I would put it like this,
-You need to optimize the anchor text of your website for better SEO results…
So that it is organically placed.
This task is not complicated, you just have to focus on what the article is providing the audience with and what its title is.
The former one is the plain title of the article but the latterhas it organically placed within your content. It’s not misleading the readers because the article linked to is talking about Anchor text optimisation.
If you’d like to know more about anchor text, I recommend the above link.
- Try to Include Links in Every New Post
For every new piece of content you create, you need to create it around a topic but don’t forget to include links to other webpages by touching on similar relevant topics.You can link as many as you want as long as they are relevant, but don’t use too much (keep it within single digits) because, as I said earlier, it will make your article look spammy. - Add Links To & Update Your Old Articles
With new content you create, you need to see if any of your old articles are related to the new ones you have posted in any way. If they are then link to them. You can update your old content (which Google likes as it shows you are keeping your content up to date and relevant), by adding a new paragraph within the old post.Through this you will not only get internal links but also, the GoogleBot crawler will regard it as fresh content with new information as you have updated it with new links. - Link To Conversion Generating Posts
Lastly, you can link to pages of your websites that have been bringing in the most business – more subscribers, more sales, more conversions, etc.. link to those pages.If that page is bringing in such profit, then it is plausible that if more people were to visit it, then your profit margin will only increase.
Closing Thoughts
This article explains what internal linking is and how it can boost your website’s SEO.
It might seem a bit boring in the beginning but once you begin to acknowledge the benefit of following this process, you’ll start doing it unknowingly.
Internal Linking is an important part of on-page SEO, and it requires the same attention as any other SEO technique.
Internal linking isnt time consuming, you are just linking to other webpages within your website, and you’re helping your readers to understand a particular concept even more.
After all, why are we doing this? For our visitors, right?
So, why not spend an extra 5 minutes when creating our articles to include links?
The tips in this article will help you comprehend how best to internally link your website for better SEO results.
So, what are you waiting for?
It’s never too late to do the right thing!