It’s a matter of simple observation that SEOs and internet
marketers exert too much of their energy on strengthening the backlink profile
while ignoring the internal linking almost completely. Link building from both
these aspects do not give a ‘pick one’ option but they both need to be worked
upon with equal attention.
With the help of internal link building, you can actually
help the visitors by guiding them to explore your website beyond main menu.
Another equal and real benefit of internal linking is that it makes it easier
for the search engine bots to crawl through your website in more efficient
manner. Lesser time taken during the crawling process is counted as a positive
prospect of a website by search engines.
Internal links
provide an insight of deeper web content
With the help of successful internal building, you can
create different pathways within your own website. The meaningful pathways
involve connection between pages of relevant context, making entire navigation
process not only interesting for visitors but easier for search engine.
There is another benefit of internal linking. While we have
a common perception that visitors land on the home page, they can actually
enter your website from any other page such as ‘Contact’ or ‘About’. These
pages, especially the Contact, usually have little amount of text. Putting some
logical content in these pages and placing links to other pages of the website
can persuade the visitors to explore other pages of your website. For example,
there is a very little chance of your blog posts to get indexed in Google very
quickly. What you can do is putting the list of the blog posts in the body of
pages that perform well. This way, the visitors would be able to get relevant
information about your product or service from relevant blog post whose link is
pointed at from the website page.
Advantage of internal
links for SEO
The even bigger advantage of an effective internal linking
is that search engine bots quickly find and crawl through the deeper pages that
are linked to the main pages. Internal linking produces and spreads a ‘link
juice’ upon the mesh of link structure, making it convenient for the search
engine spiders to cover your website efficiently.
This convenience for the search engine spiders and bots is
actually beneficial for the Indianapolis SEO of your website. Google gives
special preference to the websites which offer easier navigation.
How can you link
pages internally in an effective way?
There are a few methods that can make internal linking of
your website fruitful.
- Analysis of linking structure is the first and most important thing. You can use free tools like Open Site Explorer to get the link structure analyzed.
- ‘Orphan’ pages are the ones that can’t be found from main menu. These types of pages can linked with the main pages.
- Make sure that links are being explained by the anchor texts at first look.
- Anchor texts should be recognizable by their prominent colors. If the color of anchor text is not different from the text around it, the chances of those links to be clicked will reduce drastically, hurting the purpose of internal linking.
- Adding too many links in one page is counted as a spam practice. Make sure you are avoiding it.
- Make links natural from the readers’ point of view rather than targeting the search engines only.
