SEO Internal Links: How to Optimize Your Internal Linking Structure
It’s no secret that SEO internal links are essential when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Every blogger knows that when creating high-quality content, it’s important to seduce both search engines and visitors. However, content alone is not enough. Astute internal linking bolsters your SEO efforts, directing traffic to pages that are critical to the user experience and subsequent conversion.
SEO Internal Links: What They Are
SEO internal links are links within your website that are essential to search engines as they help them establish the architecture of the site and spread the so-called “link juice”. Simply put, internal linking refers to any link from a page on a domain that is linked to another page within the same domain.
It can be a link to categories or the main site navigation, within articles to related content or the footer, etc. For the purposes of our article, we will focus mainly on editorial links, as they are the ones that improve your content marketing strategy and, of course, your SEO.
Internal linking has several benefits as it helps build page authority, usability, connections between web pages, user experience, and potentially your rankings.
Benefits of Great Internal Linking
Properly organizing your internal links can help in many ways for your overall SEO strategy. Let’s focus on six different benefits of developing your internal linking.
1. Internal linking improves UX through anchor texts
Internal linking is here to help users navigate your website. By using appropriate and easy-to-use links in your articles, you will make it easier for the user to navigate. Your anchor texts should point to relevant and related content that your readers might be interested in. For example, if you are talking about multiple content issues, you can redirect your user to previous article listing tools, thus preventing duplication of issues through internal linking.
2. Internal linking helps spread link juice
While you focus on external links and backlinks, it is important to build your authority from other websites. Internal linking helps you spread your link juice to other pages on your site. Therefore, it is desirable that this link juice spreads to strategic pages for user conversion, for obvious economic reasons.
3. Internal linking increases page views
As mentioned earlier, qualitative anchor texts can help visitors navigate your website. If the content you provide via internal linking is relevant to your audience, they are more likely to read other articles. This helps increase your site’s conversion rate. Relevant linking will help new visitors discover your website, as followed links often increase page views. To be truly effective, make sure you have optimized your page speed to avoid huge bounce rates.
4. Internal linking improves PageRank
Before we explain why internal linking helps increase PageRank, let’s define what PageRank is. Google has developed a metric to measure the importance of web pages, based on the number of backlinks a web page receives. The score ranges from 0 to 10. Although the topic is well discussed in the SEO community, Google continues to use PageRank as a ranking factor.
A page with a high PageRank can further benefit from its PageRank through internal linking by spreading link juice to other linked pages. Those pages will get a small boost in authority and thus a ranking increase due to the higher link juice they receive.
5. Internal Linking Improves Time on Site
Linking to related posts can help you increase time on site and reduce bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to a visitor who is just viewing a page and immediately leaves your website. To reduce bounce rate, you can keep visitors on a site longer if the content you are linking to internally offers real value.
Bounce rate is an important number to track, as it has a huge impact on your rankings. In fact, some of the usage metrics used in Panda Updates are linked to bounce rate, so improving your UX by providing interesting content on your website can give you a step forward if you want to be Panda-proof.
6. Internal linking helps crawl and index
Google bots are designed to mimic a user’s behavioral process. They will visit your website and follow all the links and pages that are easily indexable. Building a strong and intelligent internal architecture will help bots find deeper pages that aren’t always visited. These links can boost other pages and help you rank higher overall.
SEO Internal Links: How to Optimize Them?
1. Segmentation and Focus
You need to have a good understanding of your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to internal authority. Not all pages are created equal, some of your pages are more valuable than others. If you have an e-commerce business, chances are that your brand pages or your main sales pages are your primary targets because these are the pages that you benefit the most from.
It is a good idea to analyze these particular pages separately from the others, setting up specific strategies for each group. You can link your brands directly from the navigation menu, thus multiplying the number of links to these pages. Or you could try creating suggested product lists based on your best sellers, using a category system to better connect your main pages.
2. Build Semantic Silos
When you write new content, you can probably reference other pages that are topically related to the content you are writing. Tagging articles that are relevant to the topic can help users find articles that are related to the topic. These tags create semantic “inlink silos,” which spread link juice and make them very important.
3. Write your inlinks the Wikipedia way
Search engines are trying to make sense of all the content you provide. Anchor text and the content next to your inlinks have a huge impact. Whenever possible, in product descriptions or blog posts, try to use keywords that make sense in your anchors. Think about it like you would write a Wikipedia article.
4. Don’t Forget Deeper Pages
Your website is constantly growing. Therefore, some of your pages may become weakly linked to your most important pages. If you want to reactivate these hidden pages, you can link them from time to time. This will help Google and other major search engines find these pages and re-rank them.
5. Don’t be afraid to set nofollow and no-index
Understanding how your website architecture is built is the only thing, but having a comprehensive view of how bots are crawling your website is also quite helpful. You can use many different tools to analyze your server logs and discover meaningful information, such as finding your most active SEO pages. An active page indicates a page that is frequently crawled by Google, which generates a healthy amount of organic traffic. Most likely, there are also pages on your website that do not generate organic traffic at all but are crawled a lot by bots. Do not keep these low-traffic pages as they are wasting Google’s resources. Instead, you may choose to set a no-index on these pages in your Robots.txt. It helps Google to reallocate its resources to the most valuable part of your website. This will help your website rank higher in the SERPs and will have a serious impact on understanding the popularity of your indexable pages.
Conclusion
SEO internal links can significantly improve your website’s overall SEO performance, from usability to domain authority. Building a strong web architecture is a winning, long-term strategy to have an edge over your competition.
