A guide to internal links and why they work in SEO
In previous posts, I have sung the praises of internal links within your website. See what I did there? I linked some words to an article I wrote a couple of weeks ago. That’s internal linking.
I’m currently running a little experiment on one of my personal sites, to demonstrate the power of internal links. I haven’t built any backlinks to the site at all – I’m simply relying on copy, some SEO basics of old, and a good internal structure. With the site unfinished and slightly messy, I’ve reached page 2 for my target keyword, which receives over 1,000 unique searches each month.
Admittedly there are other forces at play here, notably the keywords in the domain name and the URLs. But it underlines, at least to me, the power of internal links, as competitors who also have keywords in domain and URLs are less successful. So let’s look at the why, the how, and some golden rules...
Why are they so important?
When you create a link to another page on your website, you are telling the user and the search engines that you have something else they should look at.
That piece of information, therefore, is important. But what is it about? You also have the opportunity to tell users – and search engines – that the page is about something. Such as SEO.
What I just did there was highlight Clever Little Design’s main SEO page. I’m telling you – and search engines – that if you’re interested in finding out more about SEO, then this is the page for you. I find it important content, and you should equally find it important.
Search Engines send robots out to look at your site, so it stands to reason that they’re going to view it in a robotic manner. Direct them to the content that you think is important, and tell them what it’s about. They’ll see enough signals from you that you have an important page on your website, and will hopefully reward you with a bounce in the rankings. I call it “distributing authority”.
So what’s a good internal link?
A good internal link is one that both users and search engines alike will find useful. The most powerful type of internal link comes within the text – much like the example above. This is editorial: you’ve made an editorial choice to include this piece of information because it is pertinent to the reader – and may provide supplementary information that you don’t have the time to divulge here.
A good internal link has explanatory anchor text. I’ve been a little simplistic above, just highlighting SEO, but I could equally have said “our search engine optimisation page” and linked that. It’s just as good.
A good internal link comes within context. I wouldn’t just send you off to a page about exhibition stands from this article, would I? I could, but I won’t. It has to provide some kind of value to a user and has to come within a semantic context. Does it make sense to a robot? Well, if the words around it are related to the words within the explanatory anchor text, then yes, it does.
So what’s a good internal linking strategy?
This is my favourite bit. First of all, you have to know which of your web pages are important to you. Which ones push conversions? Which ones get people talking? Which ones make you money? Let’s say that you have four or five, including the home page. If you’re a retailer, you might have hundreds.
Let’s look around the website for potential internal linking opportunities. Fresh content is the best opportunity, so if you have a blog (like we do), use it to link to your high-conversion pages. The more popular your blog is, the more powerful those internal links will be, so work on getting a readership and work on socialising with them. Online, that is. You don’t have to knock on their door.
Don’t overdo it. Stay focused and don’t over-work the search engine robot, otherwise, he’ll just get confused. As will the user. If you read the Guardian online, then you’ll see internal links galore. I find this confusing. Why, for example, does the Guardian link to a page about London from this article, using anchor text: “London”? It’s not for users, is it? If I’m reading about internet domain names, I’m not interested in the Guardian’s page for London.
They’ve clearly done this for SEO reasons, and not usability reasons. One has to think that eventually, they’ll get found out. I banged on about Boohoo in another article, so go there if you’re interested (look, another one! Boom!)
Don’t use site-wide internal links or footer links unless they’re always going to be of relevance to a visitor. In other words, don’t use them in an attempt to game a search engine robot, use them because they’re useful if you do.
Have a plan in mind, therefore, to maintain some killer conversion pages – and keep an eye out for other opportunities as you go. For example, you may notice that a sub-page converts better, so find out which keywords are driving traffic, which keywords could drive more, and use anchor text to link internally to them.
Imagine you’re a recruitment company for a second. How would you do it? Here’s the most rudimentary little sitemap I could draw using my limited skills.
[caption id=“attachment_207” align=“aligncenter” width=“550”]
Rudimentary Site Map[/caption]
All we’re doing here is using content to drive users and search engines to the pages that a) we want to rank well in the search engines and b) convert well. Clearly, you aren’t going to create too many sub-pages for services or products, so the best opportunities will come from the blog – the more you create, the more you add, the more links you can make.
Some warnings
When something works well, when something helps you get ranked in Google, then you can bet your life that someone out there is using the tactic for evil. This Rand Fishkin video goes into more detail on how to avoid spamminess in your internal linking - watch it, it’s rather good. Therefore, you can bet your life that Google will crack down on it and refine its importance.
Therefore, some golden rules to reiterate:
- Keep it relevant to the page the user is on
- Keep it contextual to the text the user is reading
- Keep it low-volume and high-quality
- Keep it focused, but diversify your anchor text
- Keep it regular.
Do that, and your internal linking strategy will be future-proof. So long as you’re doing it for the good of the user experience, you’ll reap the rewards with better rankings.
Further reading, if you’re interested: