Best Internal Linking Structure to Boost Your SEO

It’s interesting for me to see that even experienced SEO specialists forget about the power of internal linking. As backlinks from other websites become harder and harder to obtain (because people focus on the wrong techniques), using an internal linking strategy with the right combination of anchor texts can bring great SEO results.

But what makes a good internal linking strategy? Well, the answer varies from site to site but, generally, it’s the foundation that matters. Build it right from the start and understand the basic concepts and you’ll be set for having a good internal linking structure forever. Syspoly is a SEO Company in Jodhpur that can help you to rank your website and generate traffic for your website.

What Is Internal Linking & Why Is It Important for SEO?

Internal links are just like backlinks, but within your own website. They are links that go from one page on a web domain to another page on the same domain. They are most commonly observed in navigation menus, sidebars and footers, but also within the article body.

Search Engines look at a lot of things when they are trying to determine which pages they should rank.One of the things it looks at are internal links.

Through internal linking your website recognised for your own pages. I know, it’s kind of narcissistic, but it’s really helpful for search engines and SEO!

If we go after the same rules as in off-page SEO, namely that a page with more backlinks is more valuable in the eyes of other sites, in on-page SEO a page with more internal links is more valuable in the eyes of your own website.

How Does Google Treat Internal Links?

Page Rank

PageRank, although it sounds ancient, is still used. So when you link to a page from another page, be it internally or externally, you pass PageRank. It’s Google’s score for ranking pages.

Anchor Texts

This is very important when thinking your internal linking structure, especially if you’re trying to rank for multiple keywords.

In SEO, things might change over time. The truth is that it’s hard to believe Google only takes the first anchor text into account, especially because Google keeps endorsing the contextual links found in the body. However, it’s safer to assume at this point that the first link is the one that matters, so make sure you use the most valuable anchor text if you plan on adding important pages to your Navigation.

Link Location/Position

Google treats links differently depending on where they are located on the website.It’s also important that the link is positioned higher in the content (but not necessarily in the Header section).

URL Path

A thing that can also help you build a good interlinking strategy is your site URL path structure. We know that shorter URLs tend to rank better in Google.

Broken Links

A very important thing regarding your internal linking structure is taking care of your broken links. Broken Links are actually 404 pages. They can be easily fixed by replacing them or by using 301 redirects. Google doesn’t like broken links & pages because it sends users to an unsatisfying location.

Types of Internal Links

There are multiple types of internal links that you can use when improving your interlinking structure.

Contextual Links

Contextual links are the most important ones. They are hyperlinks found in anchor tag which wraps around a relevant anchor text.

When using contextual links to interlink between your articles, make sure you include keywords in your anchors, to tell Google what the link is about. However, don’t use that as your main focus. The purpose of a link is to be clicked on! Try to get the user to click your link.

Image Links

Image links are pretty simple to understand. You click an image it’s’ going to take you to a link. However, despite being less valuable, image links hide an important technique which you can take advantage of!

You see, the problem with contextual links is that you can’t really use the anchor texts exactly as you want. Sometimes, the queries people use don’t have verbs or don’t really make sense. Or the keyword you want to target might simply not fit in your sentence.

Well, in case you can’t fit your desired anchor text anywhere in your content, you can definitely use the keyword in the image alt tag, which will be viewed as an anchor text. This is also a good way of adding hard to write keywords into your content, even without links.

Navigational & Footer Links

Navigational links mainly refer to the structure of the site, since they are kept within lists ( ul & li tags). Make sure you structure you site. Regarding footer links, the main rule would be not to spam too much. People have a bad habit of doing that.

So this is the internal linking structure that can be helpful for you to rank your website. For any query regarding Seo, Digital Marketing you can visit SEO Agency in Jodhpur, we have a team of experts that can solve all of your problems.