As all marketers know, search engine optimization is one of the main pillars of online strategies. From the selection of the best keywords to the optimization of the alternative text of the images, SEO positioning is made up of a host of factors that we can optimize so that our page goes up in search engines.
But within all these factors, sometimes we forget some details that can be crucial for search engine positioning. For example, it is very common to pay attention to external links and have a link building strategy, but have you considered the internal linking of your website? If the answer is “no”, it’s time to remedy it and improve your SEO with very little effort!
The Importance Of Internal Linking For Search Engine Positioning
The internal linking, ie links leading to a page to another within your own website, is a much more important factor than you think. For Google, internal links show the relationships between content and transfer value and importance from one page to another.
Internal links define the structure of your website. They help users go from one site to another and search engines understand how content is organized. A well-developed internal linking strategy makes it easier for your pages to be indexed and positioned in search engines and also increases click-through and conversion rates for visitors. And luckily, it is a factor that is completely under your control.
Before getting down to work, let’s see some of the basic principles of internal links in search engine optimization:
- The more links a page has, the more value Google will give it. In the same way that external links indicate the overall value of a website compared to other competing sites, internal links help Google decide how important a page is in relation to the rest of the pages on your site.
- Internal links are so important that Google no longer applies limits to the total number of links on a page. The first Google algorithms penalized pages with more than 100 links, considering that it was a spam strategy. However, this penalty has been removed for years, so you can include all the links that are necessary as long as they add value to the user.
- Internal links can make some pages of little value for conversions (such as the home page or the information about the company) to be positioned in the first places.
- The links from new content pass the new value to the pages that link and serve to notify Google that there is new information on the page. Therefore, including links in new content can help you index it more quickly and thus improve your search engine rankings.
3 Winning Strategies To Improve Your Search Engine Positioning With Internal Links
1. Reduce Click Depth
According to Google statements, the depth of the click (that is, the number of clicks it takes to reach a specific page of the site from the home page) influences the search engine ranking. The closer a page is to the surface, the better it will position.
For webmasters, this means that we have it very easy to quickly improve the positioning of a specific page, especially if we work with very large websites or with a complex structure. Follow these tips to get down to business:
- Include more or similar recommended pages on your product pages, blog posts, and the like. In this way, there will be more internal links within the same category or related categories, making some of the pages with more depth of click to get closer to the surface.
- Increase the number of top-tier categories, that is, categories linked from the home page itself. This will ensure that products within those categories are just a few clicks away.
- Reduce the number of pages within each category. If the categories contain many products, it is normal that they are not loaded all at once, but rather they are presented as a list of pages that the user can consult. The problem with this is that the products on the last pages are too deep. To solve it, you can choose to include more products on each page or create more categories so that there are fewer products on each page.
By putting these recommendations into practice, it is possible to reduce the click depth of most pages from more than 50 to less than 15. In addition, these improvements make it possible for Google spiders to crawl a website’s entire product catalogue on less time. This makes new products more quickly discovered and improves your search engine rankings.
2. Create Content Hubs
This strategy works especially web on websites that use content marketing to position themselves as experts on a number of topics. It is about grouping related content around key themes and creating central pages that include all related links. In this way, it is possible to improve the search engine positioning of all the pages around a specific topic at the same time.
These are the main characteristics of a content centre:
- Group multiple pages of your website that deal with the same topic or that revolve around a certain keyword. Typically, these themes and keywords will match the core themes of your site.
- It is structured around a central page. This page includes detailed information about the topic or the main keyword and links to other pages in the content centre so that all the information is correctly grouped.
- Use internal links between different child pages to reinforce relationships between them. Whenever possible, these links should use words related to the central theme in the anchor text.
The idea of this strategy is to ensure that the central page improves its positioning in search engines and that this authority is distributed among the links to the secondary pages, which in this way also benefit. In addition, using content hubs can improve the positioning of the entire domain and improve the click-through rate.
3. Improve The Positioning Of Pages Related To Events
This strategy is specially designed for brands that launch seasonal campaigns or hold special events, for example, Christmas campaigns, sales, Black Friday or sale of tickets for a congress.
To promote the pages related to the event and improve your search engine rankings, write down these tips :
- Create a landing page optimized for event-related searches. This page should contain enough text to position itself with the keywords related to the event, but always maintaining relevance. Keep in mind that it will be easier for you to promote a single landing with several contents than several individual product pages.
- Put a “countdown” for the event on the landing page. In addition to helping you arouse the interest of your target, this simple trick makes the content change regularly and therefore the Google spiders crawl the page more frequently.
- Create a content centre to organize the pages related to the event and link them from your landing page. Linked content may include event pages, related product pages, articles, categories, etc. Thus, you will get the landing authority to pass to the other related pages.
- Use internal linking to promote the landing page within your website, making it easily accessible from other pages. For example, you can link to it from the home page and place it prominently within the menu.
In this strategy, it is essential to find the right moment. Start working on your event page well in advance and don’t forget to remove both the page and the links once the event has passed.
Conclusion
The strategies linking internal can increase the authority of a site around a particular topic, increase the ratio of clicks and improve search engine positioning of individual pages.
If you use internal links strategically, you will achieve visible results in the positioning of the web pages of your site and in the number of organic visits.
If you want to improve your search engine positioning in a simple way, review your website to reduce click depth, create content centres and promote specific page groups. You will see how the results are worth it.
