How important is Internal Linking in SEO

Do you wish your site to rank higher on the search engines? For achieving the same, you must be aware of the importance of effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies for your site. While SEO is vital to ensuring the overall success of any online business out there, you should also aim at understanding the various aspects of effective SEO for the best results. Internal linking is one such aspect of SEO that holds optimum importance when it comes to increasing the overall organic traffic while boosting ROI at the same time. While internal linking might not be the most interesting aspect of SEO, it is still regarded as one of the most important elements of SEO that you need to pay attention to.

The search engines out there do not rank the respective websites as a whole in the given SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Rather, they are known to rank the individual pages or sites. For most of the websites out there, the home page of the site is bound to receive the maximum traffic as well as inbound links. However, this does not imply that the internal pages of the site are of no use from the SEO point of view. For the internal pages of a site to compete effectively in the SERPs individually, it is important to ensure effective internal linking.

What is Internal Linking?

When one site is known to link to the other, it passes through the specialized “link juice.” The more you are linking the page of your site to the external pages, the more valuable it becomes to the end users. This is the reason why link building strategy holds optimum importance from the SEO concept. However, internal pages of the site can also serve as the link juice to the other pages of your site.

For instance, when you go forward with putting a link to the homepage to the service or product page, the homepage, in this case, is providing some of the reliable trust factors to the respective service or product page of your site. The actual anchor text of the link is really important too and tells Google what the page you’re linking to is about. The strategy of effective internal linking helps in building the authority of the internal pages of your site that might not be receiving multiple external links.

Importance of Website Usability in Internal Linking

When the overall user perspective is concerned, then also internal linking serves a vital role. As the search engines will be indexing and ranking each page of the site, you are required to treat the page as the potential landing page for the end visitors. You would not want the entire traffic of the site being trapped to any random page of the site. With the help of internal linking, you can move relevant traffic across the site by driving the traffic through the pre-determined way of conversion. It helps in minimizing the confusion for the end visitors as they are aware of the next logical step for navigating across the entire site.

Internal linking also makes the users happier as they are not required to navigate always back to the homepage for traveling to the other part of your site. This is the reason why footer and top-class navigation are considered useful when you wish to enhance the overall user experience. This feature enables the visitors to click any site or page on the site –irrespective of where they are.

No Need to Link to Every Page

One of the vital aspects related to internal linking that you need to understand is that every link is not required to be found on every page of the site. With internal linking, your ultimate aim is to direct the visitors to some of the most important links that are located on each page. If you locate every link to every page of your site, the overall negativity tends to impact the usability of the site. Usability of the site is an important concern that comes before the search engines. When you tend to focus on the usability of your site, you are revealing Google and other search engines which links are vital on your site and which links can boost the website performance over the long run.

Analyze the Linking Structure

There are various aspects of the site that you need to think about from the perspective of internal linking. Some are:

• Footer: You should lever make the mistake of not paying attention to the footer of your site. Footer of the site is considered a vital component of the overall usability of the portal. Moreover, footer also serves important for the respective search engines. In the footer, there is no requirement of mirroring the major navigation bars. However, the important links that are present on the site should appear in the footer section of your website. As such, you should aim at focusing on the key components of the site.
• Breadcrumb Navigation: This is another important link building strategy that you can make use of for directing the visitors to multiple pages on the site. Breadcrumb navigation is regarded as the secondary strategy for effective navigation as it is not supposed to take the place of the overall organizational structure of the site. Breadcrumb navigation is known to provide help with internal linking as it tends to make it easier for the respective search engines to span the entire website. It also helps in increasing the usability of the web portal.
• Navigation: With respect to the navigation of the site in terms of internal linking, you are required to make vital decisions with respect to the side level as well as top-level navigation bars. While deciding the same, you need to analyze how you can allow the users to retrieve the required information in the best possible manner. The link structure is vital to ensuring the fact that the users are able to satisfy their respective needs through the portal.

Make the most of the effective link building strategy for your site.