What Are Top 5 SEO Tactics to Maximize Internal Links?

What Are Top 5 SEO Tactics to Maximize Internal Links?

With a strong SEO campaign, more people will see your website in the results of a web query. The higher your website is in the search engine results pages (SERPs), the more traffic you’ll see going to your site. You understand that people searching the web will not browse past the first SERP and that your site must make it to the top of the list if you want to see positive results. In simplest terms, SEO is all about boosting your rankings online. This starts with getting Google and other search engines to pay attention to your site.

There are many ways to optimize your place in SERPs, including careful keyword research to know which ones to add to your webpages and creating more engaging content. One other way to increase your SEO and your place on a SERP is often overlooked: link building.

Also Read – Top 7 SEO Strategies for Small Businesses in 2021

Get Your Site to Rank With Internal Linking –

Internal links guide people to other areas of your website, and when used strategically, they encourage web users to click through your internal pages. This increases the amount of time they spend looking at branded content and yields higher conversion rates. Internal links within your website can be a powerful tool in bringing people and keeping them engaged once they are there, helping you increase the clicks that convert into sales.

Understand Internal Linking Versus External Linking –

External links are what many people think of when they think of browsing the internet. These are links that take you from one website to the next. Internal links, however, keep the user, whether human or artificial, within your site. They are the links that connect the user to different pages within your own domain.

Internal links are usually thought to be only important for a human user to navigate your site — and they are. However, a lesser-known use of these internal links is that they can significantly boost your SEO and your place on a SERP.

If you learn how to use this powerful tool to increase traffic to your site, you will ultimately experience more conversions. But first, it is important to look at who, both human and bot, is visiting your site and how this affects who will see it.

Catch the Attention of Both Human Users and Web Crawlers –

The biggest mistake businesses make in their SEO efforts is creating content for bots rather than actual human users. Stuffing your content with keywords or sneaky link-building tactics to get Google’s attention will backfire. Google won’t ignore it; it will penalize your site. You may be dropping in rankings and not even understand why. Your first job to get readers on your site – that’s one way Google gages your site’s importance.

A second way? Determine how long those visitors stay on your site. If users make it to your site only to find your content is irrelevant, they will leave immediately. This increases your bounce rate, and that demotes your site.

The more clicks your website gets, the more Google and other search engines will pay attention to your website and business. The more popular it gets, the better it will rank in the SERPs. Human users are the only ones that can give your website that kind of attention.

However, that’s not to discount what the algorithms and bots do. Google and other search engines leverage web crawlers (Googlebots for Google specifically). Web crawlers are like robots that look at and analyze a website’s content. These crawlers pay close attention in their daily search for things like new sites, changes in content on existing sites, and links that are dead. These crawlers determine which sites to crawl and how often they will do it.

Remember That Internal Links Index Your Site –

Once the artificial software – those web crawlers – from Google and other search engines reach your webpage, they will begin to look at its content. Similar in many ways to what a human user would do when visiting your site, these crawlers examine the text, images, and videos and will then follow where the links on that page take them.

They examine the keywords in your website and what content is new and relevant, and then take that information and put it in a search index. The Google search index is unbelievably huge, and all the words of your website may be included in this index.

When your website uses internal links correctly and successfully, you can leverage the potential of search engine optimization (SEO) for your site and maximize your overall performance. Here are 5 SEO tactics that will maximize the effectiveness of internal links.

Check out what are top 5 SEO tactics to maximize internal links as below –

1. Clear Navigation of Your Website –

Navigation of your website must be clear and simple for a user to find the pages they are looking for. A website will likely have links and tabs on the top of the page, on the sidebar, and down on the bottom, all of which bring the user to different parts of the site.

However, many websites may not make the best use of internal links. Without these internal links embedded right in the content, anchored by text, it makes it harder for the user to find the pages they are looking for at the exact moment they need them.

If a user reads your content but then must go to a sidebar to find pages related to what they have just read, they may have difficulty locating what exactly they are looking for, or worse, lose interest altogether and leave the site. Internal links embedded in engaging content are immediate.

2. Create Fresh Content Often –

Using internal links wisely will optimize your website’s expertise, authority, and trust (EAT). Google takes EAT into consideration when ranking sites. This makes sense because if a website proves that it can be trusted and has the expertise and authority on the subject it is supposed to have, it will most likely reflect the quality and effectiveness of the products or services it is selling.

One way Google’s software does this is by examining the links that go to and from webpages. The more EAT one page has, the more it will increase the pages it is linked to, and vice versa. If a website has a ton of relevant content and links that connect, the more EAT credit the website gains.

This will be perpetuated if your website continues to create fresh, relevant content on your webpage. Google and similar crawlers will note if websites aren’t creating useful or relevant content, which could affect your ranking on a SERP. Duplicated content will also work against a website.

EAT is important to make an impression on Googlebots and on your human users as it affects their engagement. If the person browsing the site doesn’t feel like they are being told something informative and new, or if the website seems to be there simply to sell something without thoughtful content, this user will probably quickly turn to another website with more thorough explanations of their product or service. If the EAT factors seem insincere, the user will hit the back button and select a different, similar SERP result.

Some good news is that Google will never take money to alter a site’s place on a SERP. But that doesn’t mean every site is on a level playing field. Link building is one easy way to get your site to land higher than the competition. You don’t need to be a large business to take advantage of internal links for SEO.

3. Be Aware of the Number of Internal Links –

Another SEO technique you can use to maximize the usefulness of internal links is being aware of the number of them and using them wisely. While internal links can boost your site’s EAT, crowding them in your content at every turn will not help your website or SEO. Google crawlers will see right through this tactic, and it will leave your users overwhelmed and confused. In this case, less can be more.

While there is no magical number of internal links that must be used to get the best results, many experts estimate that 75-100 internal links are the amount you should be working with. A user should be able to navigate your whole website in under five minutes.

4. Use Appropriate Anchor Text –

The internal link placement and anchor text can be as important as where the link will take you to on the site. When examining where to add internal links, keep in mind that your content should read smoothly, with transitions that are not abrupt or take away from a fluid reading experience.

As internal links may be more effective than the links on the top of pages or sidebars, taking away from the content itself turns the reader off. Cramming in many internal links is not helpful if your user doesn’t understand the information the website is trying to convey in the first place.

Anchor texts using keywords will help boost website on page SEO and help direct the user (and the crawlers) to other relevant information and pages they may be less likely to see or to the more popular pages which are more likely to convert. Research into keywords will help decide what anchor text to use but don’t rank keywords over substance.

Usually, with careful planning and thoughtful content creators, keywords and the text’s organic flow won’t be mutually exclusive. In fact, it will be just the opposite. Googlebots are programmed to act as a real person would when reviewing a site. If there’s a bunch of keywords thrown into a page at the expense of relevant information and high-quality writing and visuals, this will not help your SEO, nor will it land your higher in SERP results.

Trying to anchor internal links to witty text might backfire as well, as it will take away the overall experience and information the page is meant to convey. Anchor texts should always take the user to a page with relevant corresponding information to the text itself.

If a user is taken to a new place on the website just for the sake of keeping them on the website and not providing them with a clear path that will be most likely for them to convert, then the whole process accomplishes nothing.

5. Don’t Forget Pages –

This may seem obvious, but if a page is hard to find, the user may be missing relevant content that may help them better understand your product or service and miss out on relevant information that will make them more likely to convert.

Sometimes a less popular page is not linked to and then is forgotten, leading it to see even less traffic. The unpopularity, in this case, is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. A user should be able to get to all corners of your website with three clicks or less through internal links.

Internal Links and Quality Content Go Hand in Hand –

For any website to maximize its SEO, both internal links and quality content give you two of the most powerful tools you need. A strong, content-filled website will not run as efficiently if a user can’t immediately be directed in the easiest way possible to relevant content that corresponds to what they are reading. Furthermore, web crawlers will not index all of the site’s pages, hurting its search engine results.

On the other hand, if internal links take users and web crawlers to low-quality and repetitive information, it will affect the time a user spends on the website and the SERP of that website. It is essential for any company that is interested in getting the most out of SEO to understand and utilize the power of internal links.

Author Bio –

Alyssa Anderson is the Content Manager at Zero Gravity Marketing (ZGM), a digital marketing agency in Madison, CT. ZGM is known for developing overarching marketing strategies and specializes in Pay-Per-Click, SEO, content marketing, social media, development, design, and eCommerce services.