Your Website’s Internal Links Can Be Powerful, Too

If you’ve been reading through our blog posts so far, you might already know a fair bit about inbound links, which are links from an external site to your own site, and which could help your brand to vault up the search engine rankings. We also recently wrote about the role in search engine optimisation (SEO) of outbound links, which are links from a given site to other, external sites.

That does, though, leave another key part of the SEO equation as far as links are concerned – internal links. These are hyperlinks on your site that point to other pages on the same site – for example, a “purchase today” call-to-action (CTA) link from one of your blog posts to one of your product or service pages.

Internal links aren’t just for making your human visitors’ lives easier

Now, there’s a good chance that you have a fair few internal links like the above on your site already. Maybe you simply inserted them because it seemed like a logical thing to do – for example, to enable a casual visitor to easily find out more about a particular product or service of yours.

But any good web consultants in the UK would also point out the sometimes overlooked SEO value of internal links. They’d draw attention to the fact that it isn’t just human users who need to be able to get around a website easily, but also Google’s crawlers, which actually use those same links to navigate a site and discover new pages.

So, the more internal links a website has, the easier it will be for these crawlers to move through the site and come across more content to index. What’s more, such links help Google to understand the structure of each page itself, in addition to how important different pages on the site are, relative to those around them.

Making savvy use of such links on your own site

So, how can you use internal links especially effectively on your site for SEO? The short answer is that there are two key areas of focus: the structure of the website, and link equity.

With regard to the former, Google encounters internal links on sites all the time, and when it does, it reads the anchor text, followed by identifying the destination. This enables it to connect the keywords in the anchor text to the page’s general purpose.

The anchor text is therefore crucial to Google’s efforts to discover new pages and understand their relative importance on the site as a whole.

As for link equity, this is what used to be colloquially referred to as ‘link juice’. It’s the value and authority that one page passes to another – and yes, internal links help to pass link equity throughout a website.

This is especially pertinent given how difficult link building – that is, getting external websites to link to your own site – can sometimes be. As potent as link building can be for helping to improve a site’s search engine rankings, some websites have strict policies against linking directly to another site’s product or sales products.

If, though, you can get external sites to link to your site’s blog posts, which in turn have links to your products or services pages, you can help the latter pages to accumulate link equity over time.  

Get more out of your internal links with our help

Internal linking is, of course, just one part of a broad SEO equation, so there’s only so much that it can do on its own. However, such links’ power – especially when blended with other optimisation measures – should not be underestimated.

Email or call PENNInk Productions’ web consultants in the UK now, on 020 8144 7931, for advice and guidance on the appropriate next steps forward for your brand’s online presence.

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Created on Oct 6th 2020 01:20. Viewed 268 times.

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