Internal Linking and Its Importance to SEO

Links are an integral part of search engine optimisation. Several studies by industry experts have revealed link-related factors as one of the most vital sources of a website’s ranking power. Webmasters and SEO strategists invest a lot of energy and time into building good quality backlinks. Backlinks are external links that are an excellent means of communicating to popular search engines that a website is trusted and valued by third parties. Even visibility can be improved with the help of backlinks. However, webmasters often forget to invest adequate time and energy to internal linking because they are busy acquiring backlinks. If you are making the same mistake, continue reading to know all about internal linking and its importance to SEO.

Internal linking - what is it?

The practice of creating links from one page on a website to another page on the same website is referred to as internal linking. When you link from your website’s homepage to a blog post or a service page on your website, it is classified as internal linking.

Linking within your website can help improve your organic rankings.

Importance of internal links to SEO

Internal links are crucial to SEO for the following reasons:

They control, as well as, distribute link equity

They help search engines to crawl a website

They enhance usability

Below is a brief description of the aforementioned reasons.

Importance of internal links to search engine crawlers

Search engines make use of crawlers, which are bots that systematically browse the web. These crawlers help search engines understand the hierarchy and structure of websites to determine which website should be returned in response to a search query. Crawlers identify how all the webpages of a website relate to each other and which of the pages are most important to Internet users. Crawlers are able to do their job thanks to internal links.

Importance for controlling link equity

When external links are built for a website, it is found that some webpages are more difficult to link than others. A well-written, informative guide on a specific topic related to the service or product is easier to build links to than the service or product page itself. Internal linking is supposed to capitalise on the high traffic of the content that is highly linkable and redirect it to service or product pages. The best strategy would be to build external links to such content that contains internal links to service or product pages, which is relevant to the search query. In turn, this helps in funnelling any link juice or equity to the webpages that you wish would rank higher.

Importance of internal links for usability

Internal links helps visitors or users find their way around a website. These links also provide users with more information regarding what they are already reading. This helps to improve the navigability of a website and positively impacts the user experience. When users are able to easily navigate a website, they tend to stay back longer and that helps to decrease the bounce rate. During the creation of internal links, it is crucial to ensure that the anchor text contains the hyperlink. Also, the anchor text should be rich with relevant keywords.

Whilst internal links can help you climb up the search engine ranking ladder, it can also ruin user experience if you are not being careful. Broken link, for instance, is something that you should steer clear of. You would not want your visitors to click on a link and end up nowhere.

So, now that you have a fair idea about internal linking and why it is important to SEO, the next step is to look for an affordable link building service provider. If your website is missing important internal links, you are losing out on ranking opportunities and allowing your competitors to go ahead. For the success of your website or online business, you need to judiciously make use of both internal and external links.

Nhance Digital’s affordable link building service is dedicated to helping online businesses get more organic traffic and boost their search engine ranking. Their team consists of some of the most dynamic and experienced link builders.

Nhance Digital is hailed amongst the top providers of website Seo services in Sheffield.