Internal Linking and SEO

In my previous blog post; How Can I Make My Site Rank Higher, I summarised with a promise, a promise to bring you more information on the importance of Internal Linking as part of your SEO strategy (on the proviso I’d caught up on 40/80 overdue winks)

Turbo charged after plentiful sleep I’m here to shine a little light on how a good internal linking structure can work to not only make your content accessible, but also improve the overall ranking of your website. Hoorah!

Internal Linking Example:

Digitelle thought readers interested in Internal Linking might also want to read about how to increase exposure in Search Engine Results Pages

You can see here i’ve used a hyperlink to another page within my own blog, with descriptive keywords as the anchor text that match the content of the page i’m linking to. Tadaaaa.

Quickly though; let me totally distract you from SEO for the minute and pay internal links another compliment: these lovely little things are excellent for improving the usability of your website. Used correctly, internal links can be used to guide your visitors to content that is highly relevant and of use to them, content that might otherwise sit much deeper in your navigational hierarchy. Use internal links within your content to provide your visitors with additional paths to your websites content and everyone’s a winner.

Back to SEO…

How can Internal Linking help my website rank better?

Get Crawled: Internal Linking can help to make sure that all of your pages are crawled by search engine spiders. Placing internal links within your content enables spiders to roam and identify pages of your site which might have otherwise been hidden from search engines. If a search engine hasn’t detected your page, give it a little help, link to it from other relevant pages of content. The search engine finding your page is the first step on the long and winding road to your target audience finding your page. Give the spiders a helping hand with a little nifty internal linking.

Improving Relevancy of Pages and Keywords: Google adores relevancy and so linking to pages within your website that have been named and crafted with your keywords for SEO with an internal link that used your keywords for SEO in the anchor text is a sure way to shout to the search engines what your pages are about – shout it loud and shout it proud to define your pages, make them crawlable and help search engines deliver them to your target audience.

Spread the Link Juice: We know that External Linking plays a vital role in boosting the rankings of your website, especially were external links come from relevant, authoritative sites and use the right anchor text. What’s wonderful is that Internal Linking can be used to spread the wealth that External Linking generates. Use internal linking to pass on the benefit an external link has brought to a page. By linking from some of the  more well performing and popular pages of your website, to deeper level, unknown pages, the “link juice” will be passed on. Link juice, known more formally as PageRank works on a 0-10 scale, 0 being the lowest, and 10 the highest. High PR is most commonly associated with the homepage and largely dependant upon the volume and value of quality external links coming in. Play about with a PageRank Checker tool and asses your page rank, give from the rich to the poor were relevant and create internal links, with carefully crafted anchor text to improve the overall PR of your web pages and ultimately your ranking in search engines.

Internal Linking is largely overlooked and often undervalued. Your website is your digital asset and your content offers you endless opportunities to provide an improved user journey and gain better rankings.

Don’t delay, start internal linking today.