Why worry about building internal links on your website?
You may have heard that link building is a good way to expose your website to new customers. This is absolutely true and will improve where it ranks in search engine results. However, natural external links can take some time to build up and earn from other websites. If you’re looking for a quicker way to build links that will make a real difference to your site’s Search Engine Optimisation then you need to focus on building internal links.
Search Engine Optimisation
We’ve talked before about Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO. It’s a technical term that means creating content on your website in a way so that it ranks well in search engine results.
You can do this through perfecting your copywriting for the web, creating plenty of content targeted at your audience, working on the data underpinning each page, and a good link building strategy, including internal links.
Google uses internal links to understand the structure of your website. It does this by sending out bots, also known as ‘spiders’, to crawl around the Internet and discover new content. When Google’s spiders find internal links this helps your website’s ranking in search results as it better understands what your business is all about.
Help customers navigate your website
As well as appealing to the virtual visitors to your website, internal links are helpful to your real-world customers.
People’s attention span is short when they are online. They skim read more than bury themselves in a website like they would a novel.
Make life easy for your customers and clearly point them to what they need to read or do next by adding internal links to each page on your website.
Plus, natural, relevant and interesting links within your page content will keep your customers on your website for longer. The longer they stay, the more likely they are to make a purchase or make contact with you in another way.
Internal link best practice
So what is best practice when it comes to building internal links? Here are some of the things you should be doing to improve internal links across your website:
Anchor text for links
Links should be added to natural sentence fragments that relate to the content people will be clicking towards. Don’t use ‘click here’ or ‘read more’. Make it clear what people will find if they click on your link.
For example: read more content marketing tips from our blog.
Make links deep
In order to highlight all pages and posts on your website avoid linking to the ones that are already well known to Google, such as your homepage. Link to content deeper in your site that may not have been crawled by Google’s spiders.
Make sure links are follow links
Bear with us; this is a website code thing. There are two main types of links – normal and no follow – and Google has recently announced even more.
When a link has the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the text code Google’s spiders will not follow that link or visit the page it points to. This type of link was introduced a few years back to help website owners link to external websites without endorsing them or giving their search engine rankings a boost.
You can still use this type of link when referencing external websites if you want, but when you are linking internally make sure your link code does not include rel=”nofollow”. This is because you want to make it as easy as possible for Google’s spiders to roam around your website.
Depending on the content management system you use to add information to your website, all your links may be normal links already. Ask your website developer to check.
If you would like to find out more about building internal links on your website or how to reap the benefits of Search Engine Optimisation then we can help. Amplify PR is a Hampshire PR agency helping clients to create websites and website content that generates leads and sales. Get in touch to find out more about our services.