Did you know that having a poor linking strategy for your website can have a negative impact on your search rankings and overall SEO strategy? If it takes you 5 to 10 clicks to navigate from a point on your website to something you published recently, you need to optimise your internal linking strategy for SEO. We’re going to tell you how.
Why Internal Links Matter and Defining Them
Internal links are links that take the user to another point on the same website when they click on them. For example, if you place a link on mywebsite.com/home that directs the user to mywebsite.com/about-us, this is an internal link. These links help to form your website’s structure. They can also help search engines crawl your website quicker and improve keyword ranking.
Three Ways to Optimise Your Internal Links for SEO
Although there are dozens of ways you can optimise your internal links for SEO, we rounded up the top three you want to incorporate into your website.
- Set Links on Your Traffic Pages Directing Customers to Conversion Pages
- Identify Any Orphan Pages and Link to Them
- Keep Your Links Natural, and Don’t Stuff Them
It’s common for businesses to write and post blogs on their websites in order to engage with their customers. Many companies get a lot of visitors to their site due to blog content. However, one problem they have is that this higher traffic doesn’t necessarily mean higher conversion rates. Use internal linking to channel your blog readers to conversion-optimised landing pages.
Orphan pages are internal pages on your website that don’t have any links leading to them from your high traffic or “parent” pages. Errors, oversights, or broken links can all result in orphan pages, this is an issue as Google can struggle to crawl and index these pages. You can check for orphan pages by running a site audit and looking for pages with very little or no traffic going to them. Adding links to these pages will fix them and help your SEO strategy.
Like any SEO practice, you want to have everything in moderation. This includes your internal links. Your goal is to create internal links that lead to other useful or relevant content on your domain. Your readers or potential customers should click on these links to navigate around your site, and reach content that fulfills there click intent.
Keep your internal linking simple and straightforward. This will help you build a strong internal linking system throughout your website, and assure that your website is not only navigational for users by crawlable by Google.
