Suppose you want users to visit your page, have a great experience while there, and convert into customers. In that case, you’re going to have to make sure your website is discoverable and ranked relatively high on the search engine results page. To achieve it, most organizations focus on paid search or primary SEO considerations such as optimizing for keywords, improving page content, and building a strong backlink profile. However, many organizations fail to use one crucial SEO asset to its greatest potential—internal links.
What Are Internal Links?
It’s often helpful for those unacquainted with internal links to think of your page’s internal link structure as the web so often mentioned in internet terminology. Internal links from your webpage to other locations on the same domains and back again provide the search engines needed to connect aspects of your page—and eventually to the external web. The resources associated with your web of internal links can consist of URLs for other internal webpages, media files, and more.
Two different entities utilize internal links, and you should consider both of these when addressing your page’s internal link structure:
- Search engine crawlers. These crawlers, or “spiders” on your page’s web of internal links, must be able to access all areas of your domain to index them properly. Any areas not accessible won’t appear on a SERP, making your SEO efforts for its content useless.
- Human users. Of course, you need to ensure you utilize good SEO-based web design and place links in natural locations easily discoverable by users. Internal links help your users get to the most important parts of your webpage quickly and easily; ensuring that you link to all possible pages in your domain improves user experience.
Why Are Internal Links So Important?
Your homepage needs to link to the rest of the URLs within your domain to facilitate proper usability and crawlability. However, your internal link structure has another major influence on your SEO efforts in the form of ranking factors. Google’s PageRank algorithm evaluates your page’s link structure—internal and external—to help determine how authoritative your page is. If you link often to your most important pages internally your rankings will increase especially if you use great anchor text or ALT tags (if you’re linking with an image).
Inefficient internal link building practices can waste your crawl budget on a maze of ineffective, dead, or repetitive links, resulting in a failure to index your most critical user-facing pages. Worse, too much linking or inefficient internal linking can make your page appear spammy to crawlers and users alike. It can also distribute the link equity—or SEO authority based on PageRank—you’ve built into too many pages, which dilutes their power. Without proper attention to internal link structure, your human users may be left confused, and your SEO will suffer.
Five Ways to Maximize Your Internal Links
As you can see, internal links are crucial for navigating around your page, both for crawlers and human users, as well as for distributing your SEO ranking power throughout the page. However, as with other important SEO features, finding that critical balance necessary for optimization is key. Here are five-link placement strategies to help you leverage the SEO power you’ve built and optimized your site’s performance:
- Provide the Right Number of Links
As we’ve mentioned, too many links appear spammy to search engine crawlers and can waste your crawl budget on less-important pages within your domain. Worse, you’ll dilute your PageRank SEO value. However, even Google itself doesn’t provide much guidance on how many internal links are too many—or too few, for that matter; instead, it just cautions page owners to keep links to a “reasonable number.”
For most internal link gurus, the elusive ideal number lies somewhere in the range of 100—but keep in mind that this number includes all the internal links found in your top menu bar, footer, sidebars, and more. By the time you get around to optimizing the actual content unique to each page, it’s more important to think about human usability. A 400-word blog post littered with a few dozen links not only looks messy but most likely won’t be used by your readers anyway. Stick to three or four links to your internal content, and increase that number as the length of your content increases.
- Provide Relevant Links
Once you have an ideal internal link number in mind, it’s important to ensure that you aren’t simply inserting links for the sake of bulking up your internal link profile. Think first about usability—which links would help your users and fit within the context of the page you’re linking from? Links to relevant, informative content that will continue to provide value for your reader are more likely to receive clicks than generic links.
Linking to other relevant pages within your domain engages the user and keeps them on your website longer. Boosting your user engagement tells both the user and web crawlers that your page is useful, informative, and authoritative. Better yet, increased page visit length is not only great for SEO purposes—and you’re upping your chances for an eventual conversion.
- Utilize Deep Links
Linking to relevant internal pages also helps to optimize the distribution of your PageRank weight. Linking important pages to related posts, related products, and more helps distribute PageRank where you want it, rather than leaving your fates to the whims of your general page structure. For example, linking to older blog pages from newer, more popular content helps spread PageRanks’ weight more evenly.
However, it’s important to remember that linking to internal pages like your homepage and service pages is critical. These pages are already heavily represented in your header, footers, and sidebars. In your on-page content, try to link to important and relevant but less-represented pages to help distribute weight. Consider linking to pages that will increase your chances of conversion. We often link from blog pages to product or service pages. If you link away to product or service pages from a heavily visited page, you’re helping to shift PageRank from a more weighted page and expanding user access to your broader site. Similarly, avoid linking back to internal pages that already experience heavy traffic, and pages with less conversion opportunity.
- Make Good Use of Anchor Text
While some internal links on your page can come from optimized images, most should come from the linked (achor) text. Aside from menu and navigation links in your header, footer, and sidebars, however, how can you properly utilize anchor text? As it turns out, paying attention to effective keywords and refraining from overthinking will get you a long way.
Avoid linking to bland, generic, or overly obvious single words; for example, avoid anchor text like “For more information, click here.” Instead, aim to provide context to the link in the surrounding sentence, so your users know where it will lead them, and hyperlink a short, natural sentence fragment.
- Strive For Accessibility
The adage about the interconnectedness of the internet originated with an assumption about human interconnectivity and its six degrees of separation. As the theory goes, no one person is more than six human relationships away from another. However, in the digital age, web management guidelines state that six degrees are far too many. Instead, ensure that no one page on your website is more than three clicks away from the homepage; to help, utilize drop-down menus, category bars, search pages, and more.
The general accessibility of your in-content links is just as important. We’ve already mentioned the importance of avoiding single-word internal links, as they provide little to no context. However, stretching your links to encompass a few or even several words is also key to ensuring they are visible to your readers. Creating noticeable links increases their chances of serving their ultimate purpose—garnering a clickthrough and enticing users to spend more time-consuming content on your website.
Conclusion
Internal linking strategies are often overlooked in favor of easier to understand SEO practices such as backlink building and keyword optimization. However, optimizing your internal linking structure doesn’t have to be overly complicated or time-consuming. Utilize the above five strategies when producing new content or creating new pages within your domain.
You may also consider performing an internal link audit on your existing webpages to ensure you use smart, SEO-friendly internal linking. In most cases, performing a content audit is fairly simple. However, you may want to seek a knowledgeable digital marketing firm’s services to analyze the backbone of your internal link framework. Whichever route you choose, addressing your internal links and strengthening your internal link profile will help you get the most out of your SEO efforts.
