The Importance Of Internal Links For Rankings

Read Time: 4 minutes

When you’re busy designing your business’s website, the last thing on your mind is search engine optimization (SEO), even though it should be one of the first things you think of. Having a website that looks great is fantastic, but it doesn’t help you if your webpage doesn’t rank within the first pages of search results.Ideally, you’d like to rank towards the top of the first page but without a proper SEO strategy, that won’t happen.

One thing that is often over looked is internal links. Internal links are vital for an excellent SEO strategy and to ensure that your website ranking places quite high on search engine results pages. However, if your internal linking is a jumble of links placed haphazardly all over your website – your website may not rank at all. Remember that specific keywords are used for ranking, the better your ranking for certain keywords, the more likely your website will appear in the top search results. A haphazard linking structure will result in a less than pleasant user experience for potential consumers visiting your site.

What Are Internal Links?

Let’s start with the basics.Internal links are links on your website, that lead to other pages within your own website. You can choose a specific keyword as your anchor text and link to an article or page on your site that talks about that specific keyword. A good example of this is the word “search engine optimization (SEO)” in the start of this article. It links to a page on the Connectica website relating to search engine optimization. Though you don’t always have to use the specific keyword for the page your linking to as anchor text, I do recommend that you use anchor text that applies to the page you are linking to.  Google wants to see a variety of anchor text but you want to ensure it all relates to the page being linked to.

Remember that internal links are just that – they link to different parts of YOUR website. An external link will link to a different website or company for extra information. People involved in affiliate marketing are more likely to make use of external links as that is how they are able to generate revenue. As a business owner, you would stick mainly to internal links in order to not only potentially grow your own revenue, but also improve your specific keyword choices ranking. You may decide you want to use external links to provide more information about a topic, but you definitely want to ensure they are from reliable and authoritative sources and not from a competitor. Some good external links could include information from suppliers or vendors of your company, government or educational sources, etc.

Why Are Internal Links Important?

Internal links are important as they try to draw the consumer in to spend more time browsing your web-page.The longer people spend browsing different parts of your website, the better your ranking results become. You need to be able to link to relevant information on your website.  Remember that these links are not only there to merely provide additional information that is relevant to the original article that the consumer was reading, but also to help improve consumer engagement on your website. It would be pointless to insert an internal link in this article on “video SEO” since it’s about internal linking, but I could link to it now that I’ve referenced it. That’s the trick with internal linking – you need to not only know where in the article they should go (i.e. At the top/bottom/middle of the article), but also which keywords, or other anchor text, are the most important to use.

What Is Needed When It Comes To Internal Linking?

You need to make sure you have the basics covered in order to have an optimal internal linking structure that helps drive traffic to your site.

• Website Structure

  The layout of your website is important. Users don’t want to spend hours trying to find the information that they are looking for. Try to keep it simple so information or items are easily found after 1 or 2 clicks.



• Linking

  Make sure that consumers can easily access the important pages such as the main page of the website. Try to avoid over-linking in content articles, no one wants to open up 50 links when reading one article, keep it to 3 links maximum. A ratio of 2 internal links to 1 external link is acceptable. You can also have the external link open as a new window or tab to keep it easy for users to return to your site after reading through the external page. Make sure you link to pages relevant to what is being discussed in the article as well. It needs to have some reference to keep the transition and flow of information simple.



• Keywords

  Keywords are your best friend when it comes to internal links. Specific keywords can be used to help organically improve your websites ranking. You can also use different variations of the keywords to ensure a diversity of anchor text, but make sure to remain relevant to the linked page. Placing links on random text or words won’t help your cause at all.

The reality of ranking high on search engine results can be a daunting task. Organic search engine optimization  is not the easiest thing to achieve, but it can be done. Finding the right SEO company to help you improve your website rankings and give your website an overall SEO boost is one of the most important things you could do for your online business. At Connectica, we know what we’re talking about when it comes to SEO. If you’d like more information on our services or to learn more about SEO, don’t hesitate to contact us today at (877) 816-2259