Good linking practices can have a positive effect
Internal linking for SEO is an important, but easy to miss check box when you are crafting your website’s articles. It has a knock-on effect on other aspects of your rankings so I’ll give you the goods about what you should be doing for all of your pages, without the industry jargon.
The signals that search engines like Google look at are incredibly complex when ranking websites. However, there are some that you can influence with some strategic website design.
What do I mean?
There are two things that the following changes that I’m going to recommend will affect.
Time on site and how pages link to each other is important
The first is “time on site”.
This metric search engines keep track of to help it figure out if the searcher has found what they are looking for. The longer they spend on a website, the more likely they found the thing they were looking for.
An important signal to Google to indicate that it should rank your website higher.
The second is what links are on the page.
These links help to provide context to the page that they are on. Doubly so when the content that the first page is linking to is related in some way to the content on the second page.
Another important factor in helping Google to better understand the content of your website when it looks at it.
You may also have heard reference to content that is “corner stone content“. To keep it simple, comer stone content is the articles or pages that are the most comprehensive and
You may have run into phrases like “internal link equity”, “link flow”, or “link juice” but it is more important to understand what to do rather than the overly complicated technical details.
If you are looking for more details about how to optimize your website we have a complete guide that you can download for free here.
So how do you go about getting these benefits?
- This is often easiest to do while you are writing or creating a new page or article on your website.
- What pages are related to what I’m working on?
- If you are looking at an existing page
- What other pages are related to it?
- What other pages can I link to, so I can provide additional information or context to what I am talking about on this page?
- Naturally link from one related page to another on your website
- Use anchor text properly with relevant content around the anchor text.
- Anchor text is the text that appears on a link instead of looking at just the URL
- “This is a link” vs “www.alinktoawebsite.com/cool-page”
- Use related keywords or phrases in your anchor text properly to provide additional context for your internal links.
- “I’ve previously discussed more about seasonal bulbs in an article, but today….” Is better than “Link”.
- Text around your link should provide context to that link.
With proper internal linking you can make sure that you are not only providing additional information to visitors, but also helping to provide critical context about each page to Google.
SEO Sins: Guide to Local SEO
Learn how to avoid the most common SEO mistakes that will cost your business big money. This comprehensive guide shows you everything you need to know to get started with the basics of local SEO.
