Introduction: What are Internal Links?
Internal linking is the process of linking one page on your website to another page on your website. By doing so, you are not only helping your visitors find what they are looking for, but you are also helping Google understand your website’s structure. When done correctly, internal linking can help improve your website’s SEO.
Benefits of Internal Linking for SEO
Internal linking is a technique that webmasters and SEOs use to pass PageRank (or ranking power) around their websites. By adding links from one page on your site to another, you can help improve the rankings of those pages. Internal linking can also help your visitors find information on your site more easily, and keep them engaged longer. Internal links can also help improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
How to Do Internal Linking Correctly
Internal linking is a great way to improve your website’s SEO. By adding links to other pages on your website, you can help visitors find information they need and keep them engaged with your content. In order to make the most of internal linking, you should follow a few simple rules:
1. Use keywords in your links.
2. Make sure the links are relevant to the page they’re linking to.
3. Don’t overuse internal links.
How Can I Improve My Internal Linking
There are several ways to improve your internal linking.
One way is to use anchor text. Anchor text is the text you use to hyperlink to another page on your website. It’s important to use relevant keywords in your anchor text.
Another way is ensuring that the ranking power of your links is prioritising your most important website pages.
You should also organise links to ensure that there are not many “orphan pages” on your website.
What is an Orphan Page?
An orphan page is a web page that is not linked to from any other pages on your site. Orphan pages can negatively affect your site’s SEO because they are not crawled or indexed as often as pages that are linked to from other pages on your site. Additionally, orphan pages may not rank as well as pages that are better-linked because they have fewer inbound links.
How to Prevent Orphan Pages on My Website
The best thing you can do is prevent orphan pages on your website from happening in the first place. Make sure to use internal links throughout your website to connect relevant pages together and help Google index them all correctly.
You can get a basic overview in Google Search Console of which pages are linked to the most within your website.
For those looking to take their analysis a step further, you can use SEO crawling tools such as Screaming Frog to crawl your websites links and view a visual crawl map of your website.
Conclusion
Internal linking is a fundamental part of any well-optimized website. By using internal links, you can help Google and other search engines better understand your site’s structure and give visitors a better browsing experience.
