What
are internal links?
An internal link is any link
from one page on your website to another page on your website. Both your users
and search engines use links to find content on your website. Your users use
links to navigate through your site and to find the content they want to find. Search engines also
use links to navigate your site. They won’t find a page if there are
no links to it.
Internal
links vs external links
Every website consists of
internal and external links. Internal links connect pages and posts on your own
website and external links connect your pages to other websites (Web
Development Company in Bangalore). In this post, we focus on
internal links and what they mean for SEO. If you want to get more external
links pointing to your site, see our posts on link building.
Link
Building and Lead generation Company in Bangalore
Why
are links important to Google?
Internal linking
is an important factor for Google and other search engines. But
why? And where do you start?
Google follows links to
discover content on websites and to rank this content in the search results. If
a post or page gets a lot of links this is a signal to Google that it’s an
important or high-value article. This counts for internal as well as external
links.
Internal linking is
something you control as a site owner. With the right internal links, you’ll
guide your visitors and Google to your most important pages. Our internal
linking tool can help you by suggesting related posts to link to!
Relationships
between content
Google crawls websites by
following links, internal and external, using a bot called Google bot. This bot
arrives at the homepage of a website, starts to render the page and follows the
first link. By following links Google can work out the relationship between the
various pages, posts and other content. This way Google finds out which pages
on your site cover similar subject matter.
On top of this post, for
example, you’ll see links to the ‘Content SEO’, ‘Internal linking’ and ‘Site
structure’ tags. We make sure Google understands that the content on those
pages is related to the content of this post by adding these links.
Link
value
In addition to understanding
the relationship between content, Google divides link value between all links
on a web page. Often, the homepage of a website has the greatest link value
because it has the most backlinks. That link value will be shared between all
the links found on that homepage. The link value passed to the following page
will be divided between the links on that page, and so on.
Therefore, your newest blog
posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage, instead
of only on the category page. And Google will find new posts quicker if they’re
linked to from the homepage.
When you get the concept
that links pass their link value on, you’ll understand that more links to a
post mean more value. Because Google deems a page that gets lots of valuable
links as more important, you’ll increase the chance of that page ranking.
Setting
up an internal linking strategy
It’s crucial for your site’s
SEO to evaluate and improve internal linking strategy on a regular basis. By
adding the right internal links you make sure Google understands:
- ·
the relevance of pages;
- ·
the relationship between pages;
- ·
And the value of pages.
To set up your internal
linking strategy, there are several things to take into account. How you go
about it exactly, of course, depends on your site and your goals, but the
following steps are a good rule of thumb.
- Determine
the ideal structure for your site
- Decide
what your most important content is
- Add
contextual links
- Link
hierarchical pages
- Consider
adding a related post section
- Try
adding navigational links
- Add
links to your taxonomies
- Consider
adding links to popular or recent posts
1.
Determine the ideal structure for your site
We always advise website owners
to imagine their website as a pyramid. On top of it is your homepage, below
that there are some sections or categories, and further down there are
individual posts and pages (possibly with subcategories in between).
2.
Decide what your most important content is
Then, you should determine
what your most important content is. If you’re not sure, please read our
article on cornerstone content. In short, it’s your best and most complete
content; it’s about the core of your business. It’s the content you want people
to find when they’re searching for a topics or products that you specialize in.
Because you want to let
Google know that this is your most essential content, you need to add many
links to it. There are various spots from where you can link to your
cornerstone content. Here, we’ll give the most common options, from your post’s
copy to your navigation.
3.
Add contextual links
When you’ve written various
articles about a certain topic you should link them with each other. This will
show Google – and users! – That those articles are topically related. You can
link directly from sentences in your copy or add links at the end of your post.
Moreover, you want to show
Google which of those articles is your cornerstone: your most complete article
on this topic. To do so, you have to add a link to the cornerstone in all of
the articles on this topic. And don’t forget to link back from the cornerstone
to the individual posts.
4.
Link hierarchical pages
If you have hierarchical
pages on your website, link parent pages to its child pages and vice versa.
Also, don’t forget to link sibling pages to each other. On a well-organised
site these pages should be related and linking them like this will make perfect
sense.
5.
Consider adding a related post section
There are many plugins and
modules that add complete related posts sections to your posts. If you use one,
we recommend testing whether the related posts actually are related posts. If
you’re not sure, linking to posts manually is probably best. That’s what we do
on Yoast.com – we select a related post manually (or with a little help from
our internal linking tool – more on that later) and place a link to that post
at the bottom of the article.
6.
Try adding navigational links
Besides linking from topically-related
posts and pages, it’s possible to make your cornerstone content more
authoritative by adding links to it from the homepage or the top navigation.
You should do this with the posts and pages that are most important to your
business. This will give these posts or pages a lot of link value and makes
them stronger in Google’s eyes.
7.
Add links to your taxonomies
Taxonomies, like categories
and tags, help you organize your site and help users and Google to understand
what your content is about. If you have a blog it could be beneficial to add
internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to. Adding links to the
category and tags helps Google to understand the structure of your blog and
helps visitors to more easily navigate to related posts.
8.
Consider adding links to popular or recent posts
The last option to mention
is creating internal links to the most popular or newest posts on your website.
Preferably create these sections in the sidebar or the footer of your website
to have them appear on all pages and posts.
Conclusion:
As link value passes to
these most popular/recent posts from many different pages and posts they really
get a boost. Besides that, the posts will be easier for visitors to access,
which will increase traffic – and more traffic is a positive sign to Google.
For
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