Internal Linking For SEO success

When it comes to your company or business website, there is no better achievement than climbing to the top of the search results for your area of expertise. But this is no easy feat. In fact, search engine optimisers struggle with this task on a daily basis. One of the many recurring tips for success involves internal linking. But which advice can you trust? And how exactly can internal linking help? Here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are web marketing and SEO experts. As a result, we have produced this guide to internal linking for SEO success.

So, what is internal linking?

Basically, internal linking helps your potential consumers navigate through your website. Your navigation bar, for example, is just a pretty list of those internal links that take you to different pages.

However, this article will focus on content marketing, and the links placed within the content you produce, to link new and existing content and pages together.

What is important for internal linking?

There are several important considerations for internal linking. These include:

The anchor text.

This is the text that the link is hidden inside. The idea in current SEO practices for blog posts and articles, is for your links to be built in naturally to your content. This means less annoying “click here” hyperlinks, and more subtle links to other pages, within an ordinary sentence. This makes for a better user experience overall, and makes your website look more professional. Search engines can crawl your anchor text and it helps towards ranking your page.

The location.

Where you choose to use your internal links is actually really important. Internal links within the footers of the page are something that can result in a penalty, if you dont get it right. It’s not that you cant have internal links within the footer, in fact, thats generally good practice. The problem emerges when these links have been manipulated to lead only to one page and they are hidden within anchor text that is misleading. Basically, if you need a page on your website to rank well, dont manipulate the link in the footer. Your whole website will suffer the consequences!

The relevance of the link.

When it comes to internal linking in the content, it can be tempting to link to any page hidden underneath the anchor text. But imagine how annoying that is for customers. For example if you see the word “doughnut” highlighted as a link, and it takes you to a page all about “fruit”, its not exactly what you were looking for. In fact, this is a big part of the user experience, and websites that undermine the user trust will experience a much bigger bounce rate. In addition, search engines can now detect the relevance of the links and will rank your website accordingly.

In summary

Overall, your internal linking for SEO success needs to use appropriate anchor text, be used in a sensible place without manipulation, and be relevant. If you need more information or advice about SEO practices, contact the experts at Pumpkin Web Design today.