Internal linking is an important aspect of search engine optimisation that can improve your website’s ranking and visibility significantly. Search engine rankings, navigation of your website and your site visitors’ user experience will improve when you link to other pages of your website. A good SEO company will use proper linking strategies and enhance your SEO ranking.

Here, we will discuss the importance of internal linking, how it can improve SEO, its many benefits and some tips on how internal linking strategy is optimized.

Importance of Internal Linking

Internal linking refers to the practice of linking a particular page with other pages of your website. With this practice, Google can recognise the structure, relevance and content of the website. When you link the pages internally, it also helps your visitors. They can move through your website easily, thereby decreasing bounce rates and improving user engagement.

Advantages of Internal Linking

Here are some advantages that you will get if you opt for internal linking strategies for your website.

Enhanced Website Navigation

With internal linking for pages, the website navigation is enhanced considerably. Users will be able to find the content they are looking for easily with this type of linking strategy in place. They can also navigate easily through the pages and find their related services and products. This improves their user experience significantly. Happy customers can enhance your return on investment.

Increased Search Engine Rankings

When search engines go through your site, internal linking can support them know your website building and the content written in it. They can also navigate from one page to another. This increases the search engine rankings of your website and it becomes more visible to your prospective customers.

Reduced Bounce Rates

When users visit your website, they would prefer to move from one page to another without any difficulty. But if your website is not internally linked properly, they might find it difficult to navigate. If they catch useful links that are relevant to their search, they will stay on your website for more time. With increased user engagement, the bounce rate reduces notably.

Better Website Hierarchy

With internal linking, you will be able to set a clear hierarchy of content on your website. For instance, the home page comes first in the hierarchy, then comes the top categories, followed by supporting pages and other content pages. When links are protected users and search engines can know the hierarchy.

Improved Conversion Rates

As users are guided to the relevant content, they stay on the website for a longer time and chances are high that they will end up as conversions. This increases the conversion rates.

Improved Page Views

With internal linking, page views increase as users are guided from one content page to another. This makes them view more website pages and spend more time.

Enhanced Authority

As you do internal linking for pages, the authority of your website increases. This is because you can display your expertise with these links.

Tips for Optimizing Internal Linking

Here are a few guidelines that you can follow while adding links. When you hire an SEO professional to optimise your website, you can rest assured that they will follow all the procedures listed below. If you are aware of the steps, you will be able to check if your hired person is doing their job properly. This will improve overall SEO for your website.

Find Out the Ideal Structure for Your Website

Consider the website as a pyramid and at the top is your homepage. Immediately below are the main categories or sections. Then comes the subcategories. The next in line are the content pages, followed by the supporting pages and blog pages.

Choose your Most Important Content

Find out what your most important content is and then add quite a few links to it. This will update Google about your most important content and it will display the web page in the search engine results page, thereby increasing its visibility.

Add Related Links

If different articles are written on a particular topic, you should link them contextually. This will let Googlebot know that these articles are topically related. This will increase the importance of the content.

Link Hierarchical Pages

Link sibling pages to each other. This internal linking will improve the web visibility. This can be done very adeptly by a good SEO company.

Add a Related Post Section

There are many plugins and units that allow you to add a set of posts in a segment that is related to your existing post. You can use them and add such a section. This way, your posts will be visible to more visitors.

Add Navigational Links

Apart from linking related posts and pages, you can make your most important content even more authoritative by adding navigational links. These links can be from the homepage or from other pages in the top navigation menu.

Add links to your Taxonomies

With taxonomies like tags and categories, your site is organised properly and users can comprehend our content in a better way. This also helps Googlebot to understand what the content is about very clearly. For instance, if you have a blog, internal links can be extra to the taxonomies to which your post fits the finest. This will be advantageous for your blog.

Add Links to the Latest Posts

Once you publish a new post or even a page, it is best to link to this from other content pages or posts on your website. This increases the relevance of the post or pages.

Add Links to Popular Posts

It is a good practice to create internal links to the most current pages or posts on your website. These sections can be added in the sidebar or footer of your website. This will make them visible on all the pages or posts of your website.

Thus internal linking is a very important SEO process that can increase your website’s ranking, visibility and popularity among your visitors.  To reap the maximum benefits of this process, hire a good SEO company and see the results.