On – Site Optimisation: The Importance Of Internal Linking
One of the more overlooked elements of on-site optimisation is the implementation and structure of internal links throughout a site, better interlinking relevant pages and categories together, in a constructive and logical way. This practice, when executed correctly, can have a double impact on your site, both working to actively improve your search engine rankings through the increase of link popularity and improved indexability of your site, as well as usability, helping those who visit you find what they are looking for far more easily, resulting in heightened user engagement and action than without an effective internal linking strategy.
This idea, of interlinking on-site between numerous pages of your site, may be entirely new to you, however I am sure that if you have done any reading on SEO, how it works, and how to implement it thus far on your journey to search engines success, then you should, at least in part, have some knowledge of how and why it is important to build links from other websites to build link popularity. Well, internal linking is no different, utilising contextual, or in-content, links, using relevant keywords and phrases as anchor text, working as sign posts for search engine crawlers, directing them to sections of the site that are most relevant to these keywords, making your website easier for them to crawl, index and categories, elements which are all too crucial to gaining those much coveted first page positions.
Where should I start with internal linking?
Your website is full of contextual linking opportunities throughout its keyword-rich context, providing you with the potential to pass link juice, or weight, in-between the respective sections of your site with ease, without the need for any significant changes, to either your site or to you content, limiting any possible negative impact on the user experience it provides.
To start, simply review the content of each of your sites pages, identifying possible keywords and phrases already present, which could easily become internal links and relevant anchors. Generally speaking, you should aim to identify no more than 2 or 3 of these links per page, and should ensure that, although styled to appear inconspicuous alongside existing page content, they are clearly identifiable as links, even if it is solely with a colour change on hover or when they are active. This is done for two reasons; to ensure that users don’t mistakenly click these links when reading your page, as being thrown to an entirely separate page could prove rather frustrating and cause an increased number of exits from your users, and secondly, to ensure that everything is above-board as far as the search engines are concerned, as you wouldn’t want them to think that you were hiding these links from your users, to prevent any possibility, as remote as it is, that your site become subject to any penalty for such a practice.
Another increasingly important aspect to consider, with the ever developing and heightened sophistication of search engine algorithms, is to ensure that the destination page for your link is relevant to the anchor used to link to it. This would mean ensuring that the keyword is presence on this page, in the page title and frequently used throughout the other on-page elements utilised for increasing relevancy for this term. This is important, as sending search engine crawlers to pages through inappropriate anchored links will not demonstrate the usefulness and logical nature of your site structure, in fact it will do much to put this into disrepute, something that could prove harmful to your ability to rank naturally.
As well as the anchor text itself, it can also prove beneficial to surround your links with relevant, on-topic content, helping to further add to the relevancy of your link to the destination page it directs to. This will also do much to improve the natural look and feel of your internal links, to the success of search engine optimisation.
Is it important to even the spread of your internal links?
Yes, it is important to ensure that there is an equal spread of internal links, as this will help to ensure their natural appearance. All too often webmasters will focus on a limited number of pages, resulting in a handful of pages sharing a hugely disproportionate amount of link weight than the remainder of the site. The easiest way to counter this is to target more keywords, as it is more likely than not that you won’t be able to implement links for a wider array of terms on the same limited range of pages, as they are unlikely to share equal relevance to numerous keywords.
How much of impact will internal links actually have on my site?
Improving, and implementing, a coherent, logical internal linking strategy rarely fails to have a positive impact on a websites natural rankings, and can be one of the more effective means of increasing your rank in the short term, with the benefits of this strategy being felt almost immediately after your changes have been indexed. So yes, the impact of a logical internal link structure can help give your site that much needed edge over your competitors when it comes to fine tuning your on-site efforts to maximise your sites ability to rank within the search engines naturally.
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