As we all know, SEO is the method by which you can increase the quality and quantity of traffic on your website. It increases the visibility of your website on a search engine so that users can easily find your website. In this article, we will talk about the concept of internal linking for SEO, which helps a beginner to increase the organic traffic on his/her website.
What Is Internal Linking?
Internal links are links that go from one page of the domain to another page on the same domain. Some of the important uses of internal links are:
- Helps in the navigation of the website.
- They help in establishing the informational hierarchy and define the structure of your website.
- They help in increasing the link equity(ranking power) throughout the site.
Types of Links:
There are several types of links in SEO. Here are some important types of links:
- Natural Links
- External Links
- Manually Obtained Links
- Internal Links
- Self-Created Links
Difference between external links and internal links:
External Links:
External links are links that go from one page of the domain to another page of different domains. These links may be the link from your website to the affiliate program or the links from your website to another website and are added in order to provide extra information to the readers.
Internal Links:
Internal links are the links that go from one page of the domain to another page of the same domain. These links may be the link from one page of your website to another page of your website that gives the user additional or relevant information about a particular topic.
Why Are Links Important To Google – Theory Behind Internal Linking:
Building links on your website is one of the most important tricks used in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). These links give information to Google that your website is a quality resource worthy of citation. That’s why professionals always advise multiple links on your website.
The theory behind internal linking is that it increases the overall search-optimized value of your website. Inner linking does these tasks by providing the users with a well-connected network of posts and because of this, they end up spending more time on your website as they can find all the relevant information that they are looking for on a single domain.
Why Are Links Important For SEO?
Links are very important for SEO because there is a direct relation between the quality and quantity of links and the traffic received by your website. More links will help in increasing the organic traffic to your website and this will also help in attracting more reliable users.
Benefits Of Internal Linking:
- Internal links help in decreasing the bounce rate of your website as they make people spend more time on your site.
- Internal links allow users to navigate your website easily. These links bring the reader to the desired page or the relevant page so that the user can easily get the information from your blog. The best thing about internal links is that you have full control over them which allows you to design the best reading path and navigation experience for your visitors.
- Internal links are the best way to increase traffic on your older posts. You can build internal links for your old posts in your new posts that receive a ranking on the search engines.
- Internal links establish the architecture of your website. Internal links provide that structure to your website which gives the best experience to your visitor because they make navigation very easy and hence they do not face any problem in finding content that adds value to their overall experience.
How To Set-up An Internal Linking Strategy For Your Website:
As we all know, SEO is an ongoing process so you have to improve your internal linking process on a daily basis. If you add internal links in a proper manner then you ensure that google understands:
- The value of pages
- The relation between the pages
- The relevance of the pages
If you want to build an ideal internal linking strategy, then you can do so by following the given points:
- Determine the ideal structure for your website:
Think of your website as a pyramid in shape where the homepage is at the top of the pyramid, followed by category pages and individual pages as we move downwards. It is extremely important to make category pages and divide the website into sections so that the user can navigate easily and does not have to work too hard to find the content that he is looking for.
Structuring of the website is very important because it improves usability as well as the navigation of your site.
- Decide what your most important content is:
It is very important to find your cornerstone content. In simple words, cornerstone content is the content that is best on your website. It consists of your best articles, posts that are ranked on the search engines.
This is the content that you have to show your audience as it shows that you specialize in these topics or products. You want to let search engines know that it is your cornerstone content on your website. This can be done by adding numerous links to it so that the crawlers can easily crawl your main content.
Key Points to consider while doing internal linking:
1. Create A Lot Of Content:
This is very simple but one of the most important points. If you want to create a web of internal links on your website, it is important that you create a lot of inter-related content. If you have a lot of quality content then you have a lot of options in which you can easily add internal links for your website.
The main thing which you have to do is to make the quality content on those keywords on which there are more than 1000+ searches per month and there is low competition as it will increase the ranking of your site on search engines.
When this happens, the traffic on your website also increases. Furthermore, when a large number of users visit your site then there is a high possibility that they might click on your internal link for extra information.
2. Use Relevant Links:
This point is very important, do not link the content that is irrelevant to the source context, only link those pages that are relevant to each other.
For example, if I have a page on my website on hip hop music and another page on books.
In this situation, we do not link these pages because hip hop music does not have a direct relation with books.
If I have a page on best hip hop singers then I can easily connect this post with hip hop music posts.
So, it is important that they do not link that content which does not have any relation between them.
3. Linking Deep:
It is a fact that the deeper your links go, the better the result. It is not true that all internal links are good for your website. There are two types of internal links that you have to avoid on your website:
- Contact Us: This is a blunder made by beginners. At the end of the post, they add the internal link of their contact page so that the visitor can contact them easily, but this is not a good practice in the internal linking field. Only add contact us page when there is actual need otherwise do not.
- Homepage: To add too many internal links to the homepage on your website is not a good practice. You should add internal links of internal pages to boost the overall SEO performance of your site.
It is advisable that you use internal links to connect the internal pages of your site.
4. Use Anchor Text:
The anchor texts are the clickable text that visitors see on your site. You need to keep in mind that over-optimized anchor text might result in various problems for your website. Here, over-optimization might take place in the form of keyword stuffing.
Before 2018, google used to rank websites even if you give the same keyword to all your anchor text but over the years, things have changed. Google now analyses each and every anchor text and hence it is important to use different keywords for every anchor text link.
5. Use Links That Add Value To The User:
As we know, internal linking is a process by which you can improve the experience of your user as it helps them to navigate through the website more easily and they are able to find all the relevant content on the same domain. Hence, It is very important to add internal links to those pages that your user wants to read.
6. Using Follow Links:
With the help of the following links, Google finds the relationship between the posts, various pages, and other content. With the help of this, Google finds out which pages are relatable on your site
7. Using a reasonable number of links:
Adding internal links in your post is good for users as well for your site but that does not mean you add tons of internal links in a single post.
No one knows what the perfect number of internal links that you have to insert in your post to get the best results but according to research, using 5-10 internal links in a post that contains more than 1500 words is ideal. You can use more than that if it is necessary but do not use too many internal links in a single post if there is no need.
Case Study:
In this section, we will discuss the case study of Lenskart.com. Here we will talk about how lenskart increased the traffic by 600% on its site with the help of internal linking.
First, we discuss the SEO strategies that they used to increase traffic on their website:
- Writing remarkable and SEO friendly content and posting it on a daily basis
- Fixing every technical issue that was present on the website
- Doing email marketing in a proper manner
- By making a user-friendly website
- By adding internal links into the posts in a proper manner.
Now let’s discuss the internal linking strategy that they used to increase the traffic on their website:
Initially, Lenskart.com did not have a well planned internal linking strategy. Soon they realized where their website was lagging and decided to audit all the content on their website, adding new internal linking and restoring the anchor text of old ones.
Within a span of 6 months, their website traffic increased exponentially.
They added 8-10 internal links in every post and used anchor text that included target keywords of other posts. With the help of internal linking, they were able to improve the structure of their website and at the same time improved the user experience.
With the help of this strategy, lenskart.com increased the traffic by 600% on its website within 24 months.
Summary:
In this column, we will discuss the important points that you have to know before doing internal linking for your website. Internal links are the links that go from one page of the domain to another page of the same domain. Internal links decrease the bounce rate of your site and help in improving the SEO score. Internal links establish the architecture of the website, also improving the navigation of your website, and helps in increasing the traffic on your older posts.
With the help of internal links, Google understands the value of pages, the relation between the pages, and the relevance of the pages. Build your internal linking strategy based on two points:
- Determine the ideal structure of your website.
- Decide what your most important content is.
And the key points that you have to consider while doing internal linking are:
- Create a lot of content.
- Use relevant links.
- Linking deep.
- Use anchor text.
- Use links that add value to the user.
- Using follow links.
- Using a reasonable number of internal links.
With the help of this summary, you can get a brief idea of internal linking.
Conclusion:
In this article, we talked about the importance of internal linking for SEO, we got the information about the different types of links that are essential for SEO, we also discussed the key points that are important while doing internal linking, and we also talked about Lenskart and how they used internal linking to increase traffic by 600% on their website. So what are you waiting for? Go and create more and more internal links or get advice from an SEO expert to increase link equity throughout your website and attract more users.