In SEO, the focus is often on building backlinks to your website but creating internal links can help your search engine rankings too.
What Is An Internal Link?
An internal link is a link from one page on a website to another page on the same site. This is different to an external link, which points to a different website.
Why Are Internal Links Important For SEO?
Firstly, internal links help Google to discover all of the pages on your website. When Google crawls your website, it will follow the links and find new pages to index. If a page is not linked to from anywhere on your website, it will be difficult for Google to find and index it. If your page isn’t indexed, then it won’t appear in the search engine results.
Internal links can also pass on page authority. Page authority is a measure of the strength of a page. Pages with a high page authority are more likely to rank highly. If you want to improve the ranking of a specific page, then you should link to it from your highest authority pages.
Always make sure that your internal links are follow links otherwise they won’t pass page authority.
Something else you should consider is the anchor text for your internal links. Anchor text is the clickable text visible on the page where there is a link. For internal links, your anchor text can be an exact match to the keywords which you want to rank for. For example, if you want to appear in the search results for ‘personalised birthday gifts’ then you would not be penalised for using ‘personalised birthday gifts’ as the anchor text.
That being said, it is important that your anchor text flows naturally in the context of the page. Writing sentences which don’t make sense or are grammatically incorrect for the sake of using exact match keywords will create a worse user experience and ultimately, could affect your search engine rankings.
It is also important to use different anchor text when linking to different pages. If you use the same anchor text for two different pages, it can confuse search engines.
Where possible, you should try to put internal links towards the top of the page. If users click on the links, they will spend more time on your website. Dwell time is a ranking factor so this could improve your search engine rankings.
If you’re looking to improve your search engine rankings and don’t know where to start, then get in touch with us at chat@pretzelled.co.uk to find out how we can help your business.