External links are essential for search engine rankings, but internal links are also key. Internal links help connect the content on your website and can give search engines a better understanding of your site’s structure.
Internal linking is linking a page on your website to another page on your website. This can be done by adding links in your content or in the navigation. The quantity and quality of internal links pointing to a page are factors that Google’s algorithm considers when ranking pages.
With these things in mind, here are some best practices you can use to implement internal linking successfully. Keep reading below.
Always Be Strategic
Creating internal links is an integral part of SEO and can help boost your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, it’s not simply a case of adding a few links here and there – you need to be strategic about it.
Produce Exceptional Content
Internal linking is when you link to other pages or posts on your own website. This can only be done if there is already content on your website for you to link to. As you add content to your website, make sure it is valuable and relevant to your users.
Consider Anchor Texts
Anchor text is the clickable text on a page that links to another page. The words you use as your anchor text can help or hurt your search engine optimization (SEO). It typically appears in blue and underlined, and clicking on it will take you to another page.
Utilize Follow Links
A follow link is a link that search engines will crawl and follow to the destination page. This will help boost the particular page by passing link equity throughout the website. Links with the ‘nofollow’ attribute are not followed by search engine crawlers and thus do not pass PageRank or provide any SEO value.
Any link equity (the power or value a link passes to another page) will not be passed on. If it is appropriate and logical to do so, you should remove the nofollow attribute from any internal links. This will allow link equity to be passed between pages effectively.
Fix Broken Links
If you come across any broken links on your website, fix them as soon as possible to ensure a good user experience and keep link equity flowing through your website. If you find that there are pages on your website that are returning a 404 error, you can export a list of these pages and investigate why they are not working. You may be able to fix the issue by restoring the page or redirecting it to another page that exists.
Avoid Too Many Links
How many internal links are too many on a page? If you have too many links on a page, it can reduce the value of each link, and search engines may view it as over-optimization. This can also negatively affect the user experience. In general, you should not have more than 100 links on any given page on your website. This includes links in the navigation, footer, and any other context.
Conclusion
Internal linking is vital for a few reasons. First, it helps search engines understand your website better. Second, it can help improve your website’s ranking on search engines. Third, it can help visitors navigate your website more easily. And fourth, it can help increase the number of pages indexed by search engines.
So, if you’re not doing it already, start internal linking! It’s easy, beneficial, and could help your website in the long run.
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