Internal Linking – a crucial part of Search Engine practice ensures ranking on search engine pages. Are you also wondering What is Internal Linking in SEO? Or do you know the importance of interlinking for algorithms of Google? Are you wondering about the strategies to use interlinking effectively?
If your answer is yes, you are at the right place, in this blog we will explain what is internal linking in SEO, its importance in Google algorithms and tips to place the links effectively.
What is Internal Linking in SEO?
Generally speaking, before any content can rank, it requires the relevant links. Google find the posts and pages faster that contain links. Interlinking connects content on any page with the other content on the same website. It gives search engines an idea of the website structure.
These specific links are responsible for creating a hierarchy on the website. The links allow the content on particular pages to connect with other relevant content and help in increasing the value of both pages.
With an effective SEO strategy for interlinking, the search engines easily find the content on the site. Search engines find these links useful to navigate your website. Suppose, there are no links on the page, the crawlers might not crawl the other pages.
Let’s get started with “what are internal links in SEO?
What are internal links?
An “Internal Link” is a link from one page of a site to another page of the same website. The users and Search engines like Bing and Google use these links to find the relevant content on the site. Moreover, the visitors use the link to go through the website and find the informative content against their queries.
There are many types of internal links, for instance, the links to the homepage, in the menu, and post feed. Apart from these contextual links are an important type of interlinking. These links redirect the users to relevant and interesting content.
The content also allows search engine crawlers to crawl the page and determine the importance and value of specific content. With more relevant links to any particular page, it becomes more important for the search engine crawlers. Therefore, it is important to place good internal links on the content for better search engine optimisation.
Importance of Interlinking to Google:
Let’s have a look at the importance of internal linking to Google:
Create a relation between different content:
Search Engines like Google follow the external and internal links through their bot known as Googlebot. It arrives at the web homepage, crawls it for the links and follows the first link. By following these links, the search engine finds the connection among various posts, pages and relevant content. Therefore, Google knows which pages have similar content on the website and which are the different ones.
Establish Link Value:
Apart from understanding the content relationship, Google divides the value of links among all links on the web page. Sometimes, the homepage contains the most significant link value as it has various backlinks. The value, then is shared among all links on the landing page. Moreover, the value is passed and divided to all pages with the other links on the same page.
Therefore, your new post or blog gets more value if you link it with the landing page instead of any category page. It also helps Google to find the content faster and increase the ranking of the page.
Effective strategies for Interlinking:
Evaluating and improving the interlinking strategy regularly for Search Engine Optimisation. It is one of the methods to improve the website’s performance. By adding the proper internal links, Google can understand three things
- Page relevance
- Webpage Value
- Connection between two pages
Here is a list of effective strategies for interlinking. Let’s have a look:
Define website structure:
Website owners are always recommended to place internal links to define the site’s structure like in the shape of a pyramid. At the top there is the home page; below it, there are categories and sections, further down there are individual pages and posts or subcategories
Prioritise important content:
By prioritizing important content for interlinking, you can link the most relevant content for the visitors. It is better to link numerous relevant links to inform search engines about the importance of content.
It is pertinent to add only relevant interlinks, irrelevancy can leave a negative impression on the crawlers and visitors as well.
Add Contextual Links to the pages:
When the website has different blogs, posts and articles on certain topics, you can contextually link them. It helps the search engine algorithm understand the relevancy among various contents and pages. You can add links directly from sentences or add the links at the end of a blog or post.
Add relevant Post Section:
Now the websites can easily have plugins and modules to add specific post sections in your blogs or posts. It is an ideal way to make your page visible for maximum visitors.
Navigational Links:
Apart from all these strategies, you can add navigational links to the content. The navigational links add more authenticity and relevancy to the content. The navigational links can be added with pages and blogs/posts that are important for business.
Conclusion:
So that’s all for now! With a better understanding of What is internal linking in SEO, the experts can optimise the content accordingly. The interlinks improve the site overall as it helps in better Local SEO and on-page SEO. By following effective strategies, the website can get more chances of higher ranking on SERPs.