What are internal links?
Internal links are elements of a website that helps users navigate from one webpage to another from the same site, without having to search those pages separately. Internal links are of various types, although they serve the same purpose. There are contextual links that content creators usually place somewhere within the body of the page. Also, there are navigational links, which are placed on the menu or on the sidebar or header. Internal links are more than just an element of webpages, they are the mediums by which search engines as well as users get access to different pages. Internal links are essential parts of SEO services, also for providing good user experience.
What are the advantages of building internal links?
Internal links directly influence user experience. Effective methods of building internal links can do so much to improve ranking as well as boost your marketing, paving the way to online success. Without internal links, your audience might not find the page they are looking for and return to the search results to look it up and end up vising another creator’s website. As a result, you may lose potential customers. In this blog, you will learn how internal link building can be beneficial for your website.
Enhanced user experience with the help of internal links:
Internal links play a vital role in enhancing user experience. Internal links provide customers the chance to gain a deeper knowledge about the topic they are looking up online. In a webpage, internal links are often applied as ‘Recommended Reading’ links, thus giving customers room for more knowledge about the subject. Users find these links to be helpful and automatically consider those pages valuable.
- Internal links promote more engagement:
Interesting topics have several sub points and branches linked to other topics. You don’t just serve your customers with quality content but also add internal links directing them to view more pages for an even better experience. In this way, you can ensure more engagement on your website. Customers are likely to spend more time on webpages that provide direct links to other valuable content that they might have missed otherwise. Thus, internal links are a great way of improving engagement rate as well as reducing bounce rates.
Internal links encourages conversions:
With the help of internal links, business pages can drive their customers towards a sale. Through internal links you can improve user navigation. Links used on your homepage can up your marketing game by driving customers towards a free trail, gated content, or product you are selling. In this way, you can convert random audiences into potential customers or leads. But executing this method might require you to think from the buyer’s perspective.
Internal links make navigation easier.
One common element of user-friendly websites is that their pages are organized in a neat manner. The best way to organize webpages is by maintaining a pyramid structure. Your site’s homepage fundamentally stays at the top of the information hierarchy. After the homepage, core pages are the next in line, following with all the other pages. Internal links are the medium by which users get have an understanding of your website’s information hierarchy. Users take help of information hierarchy to visit that particular page that are searching for.
Internal links help save crawl budget:
Google sets crawl budget to your site based on several determining factors. These factors include your website’s popularity, frequency of updating content, size, and responsiveness. In case a crawl has reached the budget limit, it will leave your site to crawl off to some other site. Therefore, you need internal links to guide search bots to visit all your pages and index them accordingly. Internal links will ensure that search bots go deeper into your website.
Best SEO practices for building internal links:
Use internal links to navigate users to your key pages:
With the help of internal links, you can guide your audiences toward your key pages, for example, your website’s homepage, product pages or service pages. Adding links to indexed pages will prompt Google to begin crawling. Also, Google adds more value to those pages that own a higher number of links.
Linking new pages to the old ones:
Recent blogs always appear on top and older blogs often fall deeper into the hole of lost content. But if you build links in such a way that it bridges an old page with a new page, it might drive visitors to the older pages. This way, the older contents will again become active.
Sometimes, older pages also get more traffic compared to new pages because they have developed more backlinks and therefore have gained authority.
Wrapping Up:
Internal link building is an excellent way of improving your SEO game. However, it is important to do proper research before practicing link building to avoid ill-effects of using low quality links. Spammy links can have a negative impact on your website’s ranking and overall performance. Hence, for detailed guidance on best link building practices contact Digitrock. Digitrock has the best team of experts who provide SEO services to customers for an enhanced online marketing experience.
