Your web pages, if posted by someone well versed in how to increase SEO, include two kinds of links. A web page’s internal links connect the reader with other pages of your website. In contrast, external links send your readers from the post at hand to other sites on the web.
Website SEO services know the importance of regularly assessing and enhancing your site’s internal links. The task begins as part of a broader content audit. Focusing on outstanding internal linking will help readers and search engines grasp the value and relevance of pages to a given topic, and the relationship between pages. This can greatly raise the profile of your content for the right readers, at the right time.
In light of their importance, let's take a look at internal links, how they can boost search engine optimization, and how to best capitalize on that potential.
The Strongest Reason for Internal Linking: Help Visitors Navigate Your Site
When your site offers a variety of pieces on a given subject, your readers benefit when these pieces are linked for ease of reference. Search engines, too, will pick up on your intention to classify these posts as helpful to readers who visit your website seeking topic knowledge.
As you can imagine, a good linking style and structure makes a great marketing technique. Sustain the buzz around your recent, especially popular, or cornerstone material by linking these gems! Increase traffic, and the magic happens. Your domain rises in the search rankings. Your site enjoys a virtuous cycle of being found, understood, and trusted.
Because of their value to visitors, good internal linking habits are absolutely essential if you aim to gain traction with search engine algorithms.
Linking the Cornerstone Article: A Website's Richest Piece on a Topic
Pertinent pages should link back to your cornerstone piece on a topic. A cornerstone article is, in short, a page of your key material. It goes to the heart of your organization’s mission and offerings. Ask yourself: What is my can’t-miss material for site visitors who look for offerings or knowledge in our company’s area of expertise? That will be your cornerstone content. Treat it accordingly. Give it a solid network of links to its related pages.
Do this, and your cornerstone article should earn your site's highest ranking on a given topic.
Pro tip: Use care not to overdo it with anchor text phrases — the hyperlinked words that guide readers to related pages. Yes, the search engines assess your pages' anchor phrases to sense the context of those words. Yet to avoid denting your ranking, be sure the anchor text is worded naturally, and doesn't look like an oft-repeated keyword. To say it bluntly: Avoid keyword stuffing.
Good Internal Linking Rewards Your Site ... for All the Right Reasons
Expert website SEO services treat linking — particularly internal linking — as a vital strategy to rise through the rankings of the worldwide web. Thanks to great internal linking, search engines pick up on the way a site's content interconnects, and which pages contain especially rich and well-sourced information. Then, SEO rewards the website for supplying readers a perfect experience as they find what they seek on a website.
The search engines are always on the lookout for new materials on the web. Typically, they find material by following the connections from a known web page to other pieces, so never leave an orphaned page (a page that no other page on your site links to). Linking each one properly is a major answer to the question of how to increase SEO. Indeed, this is one reason website SEO services matter: they thoroughly examine a website for orphaned pages as well as incorrect links and links to outdated or low-value material.
When we're looking at how to increase SEO quickly for a website, we look for web pages that contain good substance and good keywords yet are published on your website without weaving in internal links to previous articles. Why just leave it to chance that your website will offer “possibly related articles” — a feature that often fails to pinpoint the same articles you would target?
Search engines help those who help themselves. Weave in those internal links, richly. It's a fabulous opportunity to boost the SEO profile of several pages at once, while helping your readers actually find what you'd most like them to see, in proper context every time.
Pro tip: Use internal links from high-authority, cornerstone pieces to pages to that could use a higher profile. It's good linking practice — and helpful for readers.
The Contrast: Internal Versus External Links
Search engine optimization does take into account the value of links to other domains. In many instances, it makes sense to provide high-quality, outside references. This can help your readers accept and comprehend the key terms and assumptions in a given piece. Yet your internal links are the most reliable, assuming you perform regular maintenance on your site. You know what's on the pages and how often you update them.
Optimally, your links guide readers to places in your own domain for quality information and offerings.
Internal links are simply the best way to help your readers find the right related content, while helping the search engines move through your offerings, find new materials and grasp the structure of your company's website.
Weaving an Effective Linking Structure Through Your Website: Need a Hand?
Draw on our 20 years of experience with internal linking structuring for SEO strength. The core of the internal linking work? Finding your traffic magnets and also the web pages that need to be retired, merged or rejuvenated. By cutting back on weak content and reinforcing what performs, a website:
- Increases in value.
- Earns more traffic and backlinks from other websites.
- Engages search algorithms.
And that's marketing performance.
Talk to Us
Need a more well-rounded boost? HexaGroup can apply a full-spectrum blend of SEO-optimized content creation, digital marketing support, and tech know-how. Contact us, and develop a solid strategy to showcase what you do best.
