A comprehensive guide to internal linking to help improve your organic seo
A guide to internal linking
Introduction
if you’ve spent a lot of time with your seo consultants, then they are bound to have mentioned the importance of backlinks.
However, when they are talking about backlinks, they will often be talking about the importance of these links in terms of them coming from another website.
This means that sometimes for some agencies, they don’t focus on building enough internal links, which can be helpful to improve a lot of businesses organic search engine optimisation.
So, the whole point of this article is therefore to advise not overlook the power of internal linking.
So, we thought we would write, a beginners guide to what internal links are, and how they can be used in a white hat way, to help boost your seo.
What exactly are internal links?
Internal links, are simply links on your website there is take you to another page or blog post within the same website.
So therefore, in a nutshell, they don’t take you to another website, they take you simply to another page on the same website.
Now this can be very useful, let’s say for example a web designers’ website, they are likely to talk about the same things on a regular basis.
So, for example they might be talking about how to design a WordPress website, and they might state within the article why it’s important to have a responsive version of the website built so that it can work on a android smartphone.
Now this might just be a paragraph of text, which simply mentions why it’s important to have a mobile version of your website built.
Previously, let’s say a year ago, the most experienced web developer might have helped by writing a 3000 words blog post about how to design a good mobile website.
Now if somebody within the company is obviously gone to great lengths, to write a comprehensive article about why it’s important to have a mobile version of the company website, then it’s most definitely worth linking to.
That’s because somebody might be reading a blog post about how to design a WordPress website, but then they read that it’s particularly important that the mobile version of the website is well designed as well.
They may want to read that article as well, and they might say take 30 minutes reading it in total, and as any good digital marketing agency will tell you, it’s good to reduce a company’s bounce rate, and at the same time improve how long somebody is spending on your company website.
Now you might be thinking well why is it a good idea to keep readers on your website for as long as possible?
The simple answer is, a lot of digital marketing agencies, believe that it’s a very clear sign that your content marketing answers the question that the shopper want answered. If it didn’t then the reader would simply leave the website straightaway, if it didn’t answer their question, so if they instead spend on average 30 minutes reading that blog post, then this is a very clear indication that your content marketing answers their question, otherwise they wouldn’t spend so long reading it.
So why are internal links so important to improve my content marketing
Here are five reasons why internal linking is important when improving a company’s organic seo
Internal Links Help the search engines, such as Google Understand Your Website’s Structure
Simply put, by having a lot of internal link’s, which are added in a white hat way this can help Google and other search engines find and index pages and blog posts on your website. Google bots can simply crawl your website much easier when you have added internal links, this can also help helps index new pages faster.
So, you might be confused as to what this means exactly?
Well let’s say that you add a new blog post let’s say it’s 3000 words and you talking about a new product that your selling which is a wax cars that doesn’t require any water.
Now if your company has gone through the effort of writing so much text and advice on how somebody can protect the paintwork of their car, you’re going to want this to improve your SEO, and you want as many people to read the article as possible, so that you stand a much better chance of selling more car wax.
Now if the article is not indexed by Google then it can’t show up on Google, what this means is that if it’s not indexed Google simply won’t know that you have written the work, and therefore your SEO cannot improve.
However, with that said if you add an internal link from one of your main pages to the blog post, that main pages are likely to have already been indexed.
If it’s already been indexed, then it’s likely to keep getting read by Google on a regular basis, therefore if you were to add an internal link to that page which is regularly read by Google, then the new internal link will be followed and this means that your new blog post, that you have written about car wax that doesn’t require any water to be added to the car, that will then be indexed as well because the internal link will be followed.
So basically, what we are saying is, internal links simply allow your content marketing to be discovered faster by Google.
Internal Links, with anchor text written in a white hat way helps Both Google and shoppers Understand Your Content marketing
when you write a descriptive anchor text, yet remember this needs to be done in a white hat way this information is useful to both shoppers and Google to know what the links page is about.
For example, let’s say that your business sells a musical instruments online, and you have a new range of drums which have just been made by a new drum manufacturer.
If you therefore use the anchor text, we now stock, ABC drums, by yours now, then this is a very clear signal that page is about drum.
If you therefore have various anchor text about musical instruments, such as saxophones, drums and pianos, then this is a very clear indication to Google that your business retails music equipment
this is why it’s not a good idea to use generic anchor text
for example if you’re web designers were to over use the anchor text click here, then that doesn’t give a good idea to the shopper and also Google what that page is about.
So if you were to instead of using the anchor text click here, instead you used the anchor text drumsticks, then this is a very clear signal to Google that, that particular page is about drumsticks.
Internal links can also help to spread link authority, sometimes referred to link juice across your website or to a page
You may have heard of the description link juice?
This is the description that is used for the organic SEO benefit that can come through an external link which is passed through to a page which that it links to on your website.
Now you may be wondering what does that even mean?
So, let’s say example that your business is a start-up business, in central Cardiff, you taken over a distillery and you have now started producing very high-quality whiskey.
Let’s say that you take on 100 staff, and you plan on producing very fine quality Welsh whiskey, let’s say that the BBC, that is the British broadcasting Corp decides to write an article about this.
Then they may link to your company website, where you sell your Welsh whiskey, there would be a huge seo benefit from a website such as the British broadcasting Corporation, the BBC linking to your whiskey website and passing link equity through to a page.
It could dramatically improve the businesses organic SEO, because it is such a valuable link to have.
Therefore, if your business was to be mentioned on a website such as the BBC, it’s likely that your digital marketing company will try to make the most of that opportunity, and ask if they link can be added from the BBC’s website through to the whiskey website.
What might happen there is the page that sells Welsh whiskey, has a BBC link, my dramatically within a week change where ranks organically.
It might have been on page 10 of Google before the link was added to the BBC’s website, in afterwards you might find that the whiskey website because it has obtained a quality do follow link might move onto page one of Google results.
What’s your digital marketing agency may then do, because you have such a high-powered link coming to the homepage, they might use internal links to help spread that link equity onto other pages.
So, for example, the digital marketing agency may add additional internal links from the homepage, to the page which sells Welsh whiskey, they may add an internal link from the homepage to the about us page, they may add another link from the homepage to the contact us page.
This can help to spread Link authority across these pages.
When to link to internal page
When you think of the blog posts that the business writes, they may write hundreds of various articles.
Often these articles will sometimes cover the same topics, for example let’s say that you are a divorce solicitor, and you are writing about how to start the divorce process.
You might within another article start to talk about what are called the fault grounds, what you wish to base the reason for your divorce on.
Therefore, these two articles are related, because to start the divorce process you often have to pick fault grounds.
Because these two blog posts may well be of interest to the reader, the digital marketing agency may add an internal link.
Therefore, when somebody starts to read the article about how to start the divorce process, they may click the link to read about the various fault grounds that they could pick when going through a divorce.
Therefore, we would recommend that you only use internal links, when it is helpful to the reader, plus the anchor text must always be written in a white hat way.
Our top tips for internal linking
Don’t write for seo benefit
a common mistake that some businesses often make, is to use the same words for the anchor text on a repeat basis
So, for example, let’s say that your business sells luxury handbags, you might use the anchor text luxury handbags a number of times. However, if it’s used too much, this could actually damage your seo.
It’s far better to write the anchor text to help your shoppers find products or services that they are interested in purchasing.
So, forget about SEO for a second, concentrate just on helping your customers, if you help your customers and use of white hat SEO then you will be improving your organic seo.
So, what do we mean by writing the anchor text so that it helps your customers?
You might wish to write for example, the brand of handbag such as Gucci, you may then wish to write a description of the handbag, so that when somebody clicks on that anchor text, they know that the page is about a Gucci handbag that might be let’s say made from brown leather.
Therefore, it’s a really good idea to write the anchor text, so that it correctly describes the page or the blog post that it leads to.
Let’s give you another example, you might sell a product where all of the products are rather similar.
Let’s say aluminium ladders, yet instead of keep mentioning aluminium ladders on a repeat basis you might wish to add more description to the anchor text, for example you might want to write roofing ladders, stepladders or let’s say wooden ladders.
The shopper knows therefore what that page is about.