Tips to enhance your website internal linking structure
An internal linking structure of a website is something which plays a crucial role in making the SEO and Social Media strategy successful. A link structure is also known as navigational structure or site architecture, which has enormous benefits such as proper indexing of the web pages in search engines, easy access to search engine crawlers, high rankings on search engine result pages, etc. Therefore, in order to take the full advantage of a link structure, it is very essential to optimize it.
While making the internal linking structure of a website for the first time, people generally face various problems like broken links, and end up making wrong or bad link structure, which eventually affects the particular website on the search engines. Therefore, if you are also looking to make an internal link structure for your website or enhance the existing one, then it is necessary to follow the tips given below.
Link Categorization
Technically the term ‘Link Categorization’ is known as ‘navigability’. In the designing and development stage of a website itself, you should put your focus on creating the categories and subcategories according to the content and theme of primary pages. For example; in the ‘About Us’ category, you should only put sub-categories, which relates to this such as Company profile, Team Info, Achievements, etc. In short, all the internal linking on your website must be ‘co-related’ and well optimized for both people and search engines.
Anchor Text
Anchor Text plays the most crucial role in making the well optimized link structure. There were days when webmasters used to entice users to a webpage using an anchor text link which says ‘Click Here’, this kind of anchor text links are dead now. Therefore, you should try to use anchor text that can actually entice the users to click on links and here you can also use your keywords related to the content of the web page.
Redundancy
The term ‘Redundancy’ refers to the recurrence or duplication of links. Generally, new webmasters end up linking a certain page two or three times from the same place, which actually affects the web ranking on search engines. For example; a ‘Read More’ link under the post title, which is also interlinked to the corresponding page, this is what we call ‘redundancy’. Therefore, you should either use the ‘read more’ link or the post title link.
No-follow Attribute
While working on the internal link structure of your website, you may come across links which are of less importance. For example; there might be some web pages for which you do not want to pass on the benefits of your page rank by interlinking them with the high PR web page. In this situation, you can use “rel=no-follow” tags in your links, and this will not pass the PR benefit but will keep search engines well informed.
Sitemap
Sitemap is the most crucial part of a good internal link structure, as it’s the one which keeps the user and search engines informed and also helps in achieving high ranking. Therefore, always construct both – a static sitemap (for users) and an XML sitemap (for search engines).
Dangling Links
Dangling links are those links, which points to a web page that do not have links pointing to other web pages. In order to improve your existing link structure or making the best link structure, you must avoid dangling links on your website, where from a user finds himself at the dead-end.
Broken Links
In order to keep an error free internal link structure, it is always necessary to regularly keep an eye on all the internal links by ensuring that the site does not possess error pages such as ‘error 404’ or ‘Page Not Found’. In order to detect such pages on your website, you can take help of various tools that are available online and fix the error pages as soon as possible (if you find any).
Internal link structure is not only beneficial for the users, but it also ensures high ranking on search engines and have a positive impact on social media optimization strategy too. However, if you still find it difficult to make or enhance your website’s internal linking structure, then it is always good to hire a professional SEO company to serve you better.
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