Have you been trying hands on different SEO practices but still lack somewhere? Do you want a solution to any or all of these,
- Boost the number of long-tail keywords?
- Better respond to the users’ queries?
- Increase your visibility and your organic traffic?
While most of the webmasters focus more on link building, they invest a greater amount of time and efforts in acquiring back links to their own site. However, amidst of these they often forget to work on the part which is easy and effective. It is about internal linking.
Are you among those who have been underestimating the significance of internal linking? In the word of SEO, it plays a crucial role. Before you dig in for what all it has to offer, it is worth giving your sometime to understand a little more about the same.
What is Internal Linking?
Let’s make simple; it refers to the linking of one of your pages to another page of your website. Or you can consider it as a page with a hyperlink which will lead the reader to the other pages under the same domain.
For instance you can read another article on how to boost your boost the hypothetical E-A-T score here.
To have a clear idea of internal linking you can just refer to any page of Wikipedia. Yes, for every single entry there are dozens of internal links leading to the other results. So basically it helps Google and other search engines to have a better understanding of what other pages contain.
Certainly, it is a useful practice in the SEO world, however, it must also be noted that overdoing isn’t recommended. Internal linking must be done only when it is necessary and best if you keep it around 3 to 4 links. Further, read on these benefits of internal linking which are not to miss at all.
How Is Internal Linking Beneficial?
1. It Improves Page Views:
Use of qualitative anchor texts helps visitors navigate through your website. Now if the reader find the content provided through internal linking to be relevant and useful, they are likely to read further and further. Ultimately, it leads to increase in conversion rate. Also it will help fetching new visitors as followed links increases page views.
2. It Boosts Pagerank:
Wondering how internal linking helps increase PageRank? For this you need to understand that Google has developed a metric to measure the significance of web pages. And this is based on how many backlinks they receive. While the score goes from 0 to 10, if the topic is well discussed, Google continues using the PageRank as a ranking factor. Hence, a page with high PageRank will benefit its PageRank through internal linking. Plus, these pages will get a boost regarding authority. Internal linking even help in improving the domain authority of the website.
3. It Improves Usability Through Anchor Texts:
Definitely, with internal linking you can help the users to navigate throughout your website. Hence, using proper and user-friendly links, you can make your user’s reach other pages as well. Just make sure that the anchor texts you use point to relevant and related content. Internal linking is also one of the best important SEO factors that needs to be considered in 2019.
4. It Increases Time On Site:
Not only linking to related posts will improve the time on site but also reduce bounce rate. Basically, bounce rate refers to a visitor who landed on your page and immediately leaves after. This rate is an important number to track as it has tremendous impact on your rankings. You can monitor it by connecting to your Google Analytics. If you have been fighting with high bounce rate, you can use internal linking and retain visitors on a site longer. It improves your UX by providing interesting content and make reader stay for longer.
5. It helps spread the link juice:
You might be striving hard for building external links and backlink. With this, it’s also important to build your authority from other websites. It is here when you can use internal linking. While you build backlinks to a particular page, it also targets to other pages on the website. Thus, it helps spread the link juice.
6. It helps crawl and indexing:
You must be known to Google bots. As these have been designed to recreate a user’s thinking process, they to visit your website and follow all the links and pages. Now if you have a strong and smart internal architecture, it will help bots go to those deeper pages. Thus, such linking serves to be a boosting factor for other pages and help you rank higher.
To conclude, internal linking is beneficial to overall SEO strategy. While it improves the user experience, on other hand with proper internal linking you will be able beat your competitors offering similar, relevant information. Add it to your to-do list now!