Do your web results show that users keep clicking away and search engines are ranking your site poorly? If so, you likely need a stronger internal linking strategy.
A robust internal linking strategy can improve user experience, increase engagement, and enhance your website’s search engine rankings. Your links are the navigational points that guide users and search engines through your site. And if pages aren’t on the map, no one will ever see them.
So, to help you improve your linking strategy, we want to give you some pro tips and best practices that you can start implementing today!
What is Internal Interlinking?
In the most basic terms, internal linking is the process of linking one page of your website to another page of your website. This allows search engines to understand your website’s structure so they can effectively crawl and index your content for search results.
But it’s not just for search engines, it’s also for visitors. By having a clear structure with links, you can guide users through your website so they see everything that’s relevant to them.
A clear internal linking structure can:
- Improve User Experience: By linking relevant content together, you can create a clear path through your site, ensuring that users stay longer and check out everything that may be relevant to them and their needs, without getting lost and clicking away.
- Enhance Search Engine Rankings: As I briefly mentioned above, search engines rely on internal links for crawling and indexing your content. A clear structure with relevant links will ensure the bots don’t miss anything and rank your website effectively for all relevant search terms.
- Increases Engagement: Just like our innate desire to press big red buttons, we also love to click links, especially if we think they’ll provide more value. So, by linking related content, you can encourage further engagement with more of your pages.
Optimising Anchor Text
One of the first steps in creating an internal linking strategy is to know what terms to link. This is your anchor text. One thing to note here is that quality is far more important than quality. To help you get started, consider the following:
- Use Descriptive, Keyword-Rich Anchor Text: Anchor text plays an important role in providing context about links. Without it, users won’t know what they’re clicking on and so won’t click. You need text that is descriptive and rich in keywords–good practice can be to use the keyword of the linked page. Avoid being generic– “click here” is common but often ineffective.
- Balance Anchor Text Diversity: I know I just said to use keywords, and that is important, but so is variety. Attempt to maintain a careful balance between exact matches, partial matches and brand-based text. Search engines can sometimes penalise over-optimisation, so it needs to be natural and diverse.
- Avoid Keyword Stuffing: Similar to over-optimisation, search engines also penalise stuffing. This comes back to…quality is better than quantity! Focus on providing a few high-value links with varied anchor text rather than cramming in many keywords or links.
Know What Content to Link
Next, decide what to link. Build a strong internal linking structure that focuses on driving users to your high-authority pages and provides value:
- Link from High-Authority Pages: The first level of your linking structure should focus on driving users from your high-authority pages, such as your homepage, product/service pages or top-performing blog posts. These are generally where they will first land and it’s your job to navigate them from there.
- Create Relevant Content Clusters: From there, you can create content clusters. This will be a cluster of blogs covering similar topics that link back to pillar or product/service pages. This creates a smooth journey from education to sales.
- Optimise Product/Service Page Linking: Then, do the reverse. Link your product/service pages to relevant blog articles to enhance their knowledge and prove that you know your stuff.
- Utilise Site Navigation Links: But, most importantly, focus on your main site navigation (top menus and footers). These are the main links that users will see and use to navigate your site, so they need to include all of your most important pages and flow naturally.
Regular Monitoring
Finally, and most importantly, keep them relevant and up-to-date, by auditing and updating them regularly and as required:
- Regularly Audit and Update Links: Over time links can break or content can become outdated. To ensure your linking structure and website are relevant, it’s important to perform periodic audits to check for broken links and opportunities for further optimisation.
- Fix Broken Links: I know I mentioned this above, but it’s only because it’s important. Broken links impact your SEO and user experience more than you think. They halt the crawling process and make users lose trust. So, again, identify and fix broken links ASAP!
Enhance Your Internal Linking Strategy for Digital Marketing Results
Now that you know the basics, you can go forth and create a strong internal linking strategy. With these best practices, you can ensure that search engines never struggle with crawling or ranking your website again. And, you’ll also encourage users to spend more time on your website, increasing the chances of a conversion.
But, if you’re still not sure where to start, our team can help! Our experts know all the ins and outs of SEO and linking strategies. Contact us today to discuss how we can help boost your SEO performance.
