Out of the 200 ranking factors utilized by Google, which are the most important ones? That’s tough to answer because most of them are needed. One of them is internal linking, which can not only boost your keyword ranking potential but also drive traffic to other pages on your website. This, in turn, supports your SEO efforts. In this blog, we explain what are internal links and its benefits so that you know and start incorporating them.
Most marketers know what internal links are and their benefits, but for the ones who might have overlooked, they are hyperlinks from one of your web pages to another page existing on the same domain. This creates an interconnected network of content that is similar, which makes site navigation easier for users. You shouldn’t confuse this with external linking, which are links pointing to another page of a website.
What are the benefits of internal linking in SEO? It offers a ton of benefits when it comes to SEO and website rankings. By strategically linking relevant content pages together, you guide search engines to crawl and index these pages. This improves site visibility and enhances user experience, encouraging visitors to spend more time on your site and reducing bounce rates. Now that you have gotten a brief understanding about this, let’s move on to learning the benefits.
So you’ll want to know what are the benefits of internal linking in SEO? Exactly. For those wondering why internal linking matters, it essentially converts individual web pages into part of a bigger content network that keeps users engaged.
In SEO, link building is achieved in two ways: internal and external linking. Compared to external linking, you can achieve a lot of things with internal linking, such as determining which keywords to use in your anchor texts, choosing which pages to boost, and many more. The importance given to external linking must be given to internal linking, too.
Through internal linking, a clear navigation path is created throughout a website. This allows users to find content related to their interest, thereby creating a deeper engagement and spending much longer on the website. Connecting relevant content pages through linking prevents users from getting lost and ensures they explore further. All these points ultimately contribute to a satisfying user experience.
If your website has, say, 30 pages, not all of them might be valuable to your customers. Therefore, it is wise to link the pages that offer value. Adding valuable pages to your internal linking strategy signals Google to rank such pages higher in the SERPs.
What are internal links and their benefits? Apart from getting higher rankings, it provides users with a stable site navigation experience and drives them to conversion. By strategically linking relevant content, you can achieve that result. You have to start with creating the right content, optimising it for search and implementing strategic internal linking.
One of the biggest perks of internal linking is the complete control you have over the strategy. From choosing keywords and target pages to linking the pages, everything is in your control. Unlike external linking, where you have to depend on a third party, you don’t have to do that in internal linking.
If you have multiple pages linking to a highly valuable article on your website, users are more likely to access them on your website through these links. This means that more pages are visited, which, in turn, translates to a positive user experience. Since user experience is considered one of the important ranking factors by Google, building a better user experience helps outrank competition on Google.
Don’t like the way you implemented your internal linking strategy? Or does it need to be reconfigured to accommodate newer changes? That is possible with internal linking. Modifying existing backlinks to point them to your newer pages is considered difficult, but that isn’t the case with internal linking.
The way search engine crawlers work is simple. When these automated algorithms find your website, they scout for information such as titles, images, keywords, and links, which are indexed. Since crawlers check your internal and external links for discovering contents, having a robust interconnected network of internal links significantly improves this process
Continuing from our above point, when a search engine crawls a webpage, having internal links allows it to quickly discover content that hasn’t been indexed. Therefore, if your website has a well-crafted internal linking structure, the chances of new content being discovered and indexed are higher.
With internal linking, users are more likely to visit and stay on websites for longer times. This results in lower bounce rates, i.e. when customers visit and leave early. Now, when it comes to internal linking and bounce rates, it is essential to consider the number of internal links per webpage. Having several links will have a significant impact on lowering bounce rates.
One of the important benefits of internal linking you must learn about is that every single link has a factor known as link equity. This is termed as a measure of authority that a dedicated link passes from one page to the other. Therefore, linking webpages helps spread link equity. Strategically implementing internal linking between valuable pages and related ones ensures that the link equity of the valuable page is spread to areas of other pages.
Compared to regular keywords, long-tail keywords have a much higher conversion rate. When your website has a robust internal linking network, it enables search engine crawlers to discover and index related pages. By strategically linking to webpages whose content is targeted for long-tail keywords, the internal links from related pages help search engines understand the context, thereby boosting the visibility of those specific keywords.
When search engines crawl your website and discover multiple pages relevant to the same keyword, that’s when keyword cannibalization occurs. Such a situation makes Google struggle to choose the right webpage for ranking purposes. Internal linking fixes this by strategically pointing search engine crawlers and users towards the most relevant pages for specific keywords.
Why is internal linking important for SEO? It drastically enhances website navigation, which results in boosting overall organic traffic. Since it links relevant pages within your site, this guides both users and search engine crawlers to identify and index more of your content, thereby improving site visibility.
When multiple relevant pages are linked together within a website, users can easily discover them and navigate with ease. This makes them stay longer and explore further. As they are presented with additional pathways offering valuable information, this enhances click-through rates, which is something Google takes notice of and assigns higher rankings.
Now that you are aware of the benefits of internal linking, it’s high time to implement a strong internal linking strategy for your site. The better the interlinking architecture is, the better your SEO performance will be. Reaching out to one of the trusted ui ux design agency in Dubai, GTECH, is the right way to start if you are having trouble maintaining an interlinking structure for your website. Our team will handle it with ease and ensure your website ranks high on Google’s SERPs.
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