Internal Linking Strategies

An important aspect of your web design is always going to be the navigation – you want your customers to be able to get around your website easily, with relevant pages easily found from the page they are currently on. You have probably already read this a hundred times on this website, but we will say it again – if your site is designed for humans first, and search engines second, then the vast majority of the time it will actually perform very well in the search results. You want your customers to get between relevant content easily, and believe it or not you also want the search engine robots to find closely related content. This will help build a theme for your site and help to add credibility to your claim to rank highly for your targetted keywords.

Navigational Internal Linking

So, as mentioned above, you need a good menu navigational structure to allow visitors to get between the main areas of yoru website. If you are selling goods and services online, this would probably mean having your categories in that menu structure. If you have a content site (like this one) then your article structure would be in the menu system. This is vital as it tells your human visitors what pages are important and allows them a quick way to switch between the major areas of your website. It is equally vital to the search engine visitors as it lets them know what pages you consider to be the most important, and therefore which keywords your entire site should be ranked under.

Contextual Internal Linking

Within each individual page of your site, chances are there are other pages which have a high relevancy to the content. You may even reference them within your text. What would make most sense to you to do with this reference? Your first instincts are right – link the reference to the page you are referencing and you wont go far wrong. The search engines LOVE this kind of internal linking, as the link itself carries a clue to the search engine about what the page it links to is all about. The fact that the text is inside the content of another page means that it MUST be relevant, and relevancy is a massive factor to how well your website ranks for any particular keyword.

As an example of how well this particular strategy works, consider wikipedia. Within the definitions of any particular term, any words which have a definition elsewhere within wikipedia will be linked. This kind of internal linking allows the search engine robots to navigate around your website in a way which makes sense, and also means that your content can get indexed very quickly.

If you have asked us to complete your SEO for you, chances are we can develop an automated way of completing this internal linking strategy for you. If you are doing your own SEO then we strongly suggest you ask your developer to investigate automating this task, or you can ask us for a quote to do so by contacting us. Both your navigational structure and your contextual linking are vital components of your internal linking and your overall SEO strategy.