Proven Internal Linking Strategies for more Conversions
Internal Linking, as known as ‘Interlinking’ is an important on-page SEO factor that helps to improve the page rank significantly. Interlinking is the method of connecting a page to another page within the website. There are plenty of links on your website in the sidebar, navigation panel, drop-down menus etc.
With so many existing links, you should be thinking “why you need internal links?” Well, internal links help the search engines to discover and index the web pages. By creating internal links, you are defining the website architecture to search engines.
When you create internal links strategically – you are passing the credibility to low authority pages. Besides this, internal linking enhances the user experience by helping the visitors navigate through similar topics.
Pages without even a single internal link are known as ‘Orphan Pages’. The crawler may not index these pages, even if they are just a few clicks away from the home page.
In short, internal linking is important for sites that want a higher ranking in search engines. In this section, we will take a look at internal linking best practices you can implement to start driving more traffic to your website.
Descriptive Anchor Text
When building anchor links, it is very important to use descriptive anchor texts. They not only tell the reader where they will land after clicking – but also help search bots.
When creating anchor texts, you need to keep in mind that they are different from the tagged images.
Deep Linking
Most of the websites have multiple links to the home page and contact us page. The deeper the links go – the better is the crawl rate. Most of the sites have excessive links on the homepage. However, to boost the SEO – you should consider pointing more links at the homepage.
The best and most natural links in the content are deep within the structure.
Relevant links
Most people make the mistake of linking irrelevant pages. There should be some logic between the internal links rather than a daunting task.
If you have high compelling content on your website with high traffic – try to link with the conversion page with a strong call-to-action.
Include follow links
The follow links in the website are beneficial when you don’t want Google to crawl a particular link. However, it is not an ethical way of creating internal links.
Add long breadcrumbs
This is another internal linking strategy that helps you drive tons of traffic to your website. Breadcrumbs are the navigation paths that not only help the user understand his path – but also help search engines to navigate the pages easily.
Google can also display the breadcrumbs as rich-snippets within the search results.
Crawlable link structure
If you want the search engines to easily find and index all the pages on your website – you should create a crawlable link structure.
Crawlability means the ease of Google to crawl your website and discover all the destination pages without encountering dead-ends. All the pages on the website need to be reached via a hyperlink. Else, the webpages may not be discovered.
Your website should have main link navigation so that search engines can find it easily. You can use Open Site Explorer to see your website’s link structure.
Natural links
Try to include natural links that match the context of the content. The users are more likely to click on the links and explore other pages of your website.
Besides the above, you need to create a lot of internal pages with informative content and create multiple internal links.
It is important to use a reasonable number of links on your website. On average, search engines crawl nearly 150 links on each page and hence it is wise to limit the number of links on any page to 150.
