How to Use Internal Links to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings
Internal links are one of the most important ways to improve your rankings and help search engines and users navigate your website. By strategic placement of internal links, you can not only improve the rankings of your website but also increase the number of time users spend on your site. In this post, we’ll show you how to use internal links to ensure your making the most of your link authority.
What are Internal Links?
Internal links are hyperlinks that point to other pages on the same website. They contrast with external links, which are hyperlinks that point to pages on other websites.
How Do Internal Links Help SEO?
Internal links help you highlight to search engines and users alike which pages on your website are most important. The more links you have to a single page (such as run of site via the navigation), the higher you are likely to rank for the phrases that page is optimised for.
In addition, internal linking helps users navigate your website by providing them with a path from one page to another. If done correctly, this can keep users engaged with your content for longer periods, which is a positive signal to search engines that can also lead to higher rankings.
How To Optimise Your Internal Links
Now that we’ve gone over why internal linking is important for SEO, let’s look at how you can optimise your internal links for maximum benefit. Here are a few tips:
- Make sure all of your pages can be reached by at least one link from another page on your site. This helps ensure that search engine crawlers can find and index all of your content. Pages without a single internal link are considered
orphaned,this can be a signal of a low-quality site when these occur in high volumes. - Use keyword-rich anchor text for your internal links. This will help search engines understand what the linked page is about and improve your rankings accordingly. As mentioned above, however, be careful not to overdo it with the keywords or it may cause drops in rankings.
- Link to relevant pages whenever possible. Not all of your internal links need to be keyword-rich; sometimes it makes more sense from a user perspective to link to a page that is related (albeit non-optimized) than one that is optimized but not related. For example, if you have a page about “blue jeans” that is optimised for the keyword “jeans,” it would make more sense from a user perspective to link to a page about “skinny jeans” than one about “red shoes.” Search engines will also appreciate the relevance of the link, even if the anchor text isn’t optimised.
Suggestions on How to Widen Internal Links Across a Website
- Make use of mega menus to add a higher volume of links to categories and pages in your main navigation.
- A larger footer with 3-4 columns of menus.
- If you sell products, be sure to show “Related Products” e.g. a SATA cable for that new hard drive you’re buying, or a charger and headphones for the new phone being purchased.
- Product categories should show a sub-menu of sub-categories down the left or right-hand side.
- Breadcrumb trail should be on all pages and include a full category path e.g. Home > Shop > Hard Drives > SATA Hard Drives.
- Blog Post should have related blog posts in the footer.
- On product/service pages, at the bottom display related blog posts.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a way to boost your rankings after your pages and content are optimised, look no further than your own internal linking. It’s a great way to improve both your website’s crawlability and engagement with users, whilst ensuring PageRank flows to all of your most important pages.
If you want to find out more about internal linking or would like help with your website, get in touch with us today!