Effective internal linking

Internal linking, so what actually is it?

If you want your online efforts to be profitable, you should opt for optimization and SEO for your website. One of the important elements of working on a website is internal linking. It does not require a lot of work, and already at the start allows us to gain recognition of the search engine and the user. It consists of creating such a structure of your website that you can easily reach all its subpages. With the right site architecture, Google’s robots know where to go and why, and users will stay on your site for longer. Read on to learn what to do and what to avoid and for effective linking

Linking random phrases

You can read more about links and SEO here.

The above sentence is an example of linking a random phrase that will not produce any SEO effect, although it will be clear and readable to the user. If you would like to be successful on both levels, then for each subpage you should have selected keywords that you want it to be ranked for. If you would like to position yourself on the phrase “petrol mowers” you should arrange your blog article or other text in such a way that it contains that keyword and the link should be placed in it.

It is also a good practice to place the link in the form of a full url, where the keyword is contained in it, e. g. domain. com/keyword-w-address

A small number of links leading to an important page

When using internal links, it’s not only the quality and the linked phrase that matters, but the quantity is also important. It’s safe to say that the more the better. Especially if we talk about particular services that you put the biggest emphasis on.

If you have a blog, you can post articles describing your product, its use or advantages and disadvantages. In such text, you can easily add a link to the product. This has an impact on Google’s robots. They get a clear signal of what page is relevant to you, as well as on users who will browse your site with more ease.

Lack of optimization of old content

This is a very important element that most site owners forget about. In an age where Content Marketing is the King, it’s important to not only create new, valuable content. It’s also important to go back to articles you have already written and update them.

Refreshes can involve expanding or adding content, as well as internal links to new articles. This is important for several reasons:

• The older the website, the more trust it’s given by the search engine;
• More trust = more SEO power conveyed.

If you don’t do this then you don’t enhance the newer pages and the old pages become obsolete. And as we mentioned above – the more links, the better.

First Link Counts

Also, don’t go from extreme to extreme and create articles with internal links alone in the content. First of all – it looks bad and unnatural, and secondly you can harm your website. If you place, for example, three links to one page, the search engine robot will take into account only the first one. Therefore, we recommend that per article of 3,000 – 4,000 characters, 2-3 internal links of different addresses should be placed.

Lack of the 3-step rule

The website user must be able to move around freely. He or she won’t want to search for a particular product or category in a thicket of links especially when he gets to a particular subpage from a search engine. It happens that a user enters the site and completely doesn’t know where he is, and the url in the search engine, instead of indicating /category/product, displays random characters (which means that friendly url addresses are not used).

Therefore – especially in the case of shops – try to apply the 3-step rule, which assumes that each page on the website can be reached in 3 clicks. One example could be the following layout: domain.com -> category -> product or domain. com-> category -> subcategory -> product.

This structure allows the user to quickly reach the category or product of interest without wandering around your website. This is also an action that favourably affects the search engine robots, to which we point the right way and guide it from the home page, through the category, to the products. This accelerates the indexation of your website, so the changes made to it will bring effects faster.

No expansion of your service structure

Expanding the structure of your website has a positive impact on internal linking as well as general SEO efforts. When publishing articles and creating new subpages, linking can be used in two directions. Link from new content to older articles, and conversely, link from old articles to newer ones.

Hiding links from robots and users

Finally, we caution against using the procedure of hiding links. By this we mean, for example, giving the letters the same color as the page background. It’s also hiding text behind an image or setting the font size to zero.

We realize that some people may do this unknowingly, but remember that there is a penalty for doing so. It is often associated with the removal of a page from search results. You can read more about link hiding on Google’s website.

It may seem that the examples we have given are overwhelming. And on top of that, there is more opportunity to make a mistake than to succeed. Finally, we would like to give you 4 tips that you should follow if you want your internal linking to be correct:

• Links should have the “dofollow” attribute.
• Linking should be varied, such as from blog to store, from product to category.
• Linking posts and articles thematically related to each other.
• All links must be the same either with or without WWW – for search engine robots they are two different sites.

If you would like to know if the linking on your website is correct, or would like to know what else you can do to improve your website’s position, please contact us and do an SEO audit of your website.