Make your users stay in your website with the best internal linking structure

A complete guide on how to set up a proper internal linking structure on your website.Internal linking is an excellent collaboration and growth strategy for your own website. It’s a highly effective tactic that, unfortunately, most companies often forget or not take into account. They are ideal for increasing ranking and positioning yourself among various search engines.

Link building is an ideal strategy to create links between other blogs or web pages. It helps to increase traffic organically and also to increase your website conversions. That’s why in this blog we will explain how to create a proper internal link structure on a website.

What is an internal link?

To know how to do internal linking on a website, we must start by defining what an internal link is. They are those links that point from one page to another on the same website. Contrary to popular belief, internal links aren’t what redirects to another domain.

Most often than not, new websites focus more on their relationships with external sources to rank on different search engines. However, if you want to rank well, you must not ignore the importance of internal linking.

After all, achieving a good positioning doesn’t only consist of using an SEO tool and choosing good keywords. That’s why you must pay attention to strategies like these, even if they are more complex. Only in this way will you be able to grab the attention of new readers.

What is interlinking?

This term is another way of calling internal linking tactics. Interlinking is the process of creating internal links on relevant pages on your own website.

These links must relate to the topic or content written in the entry or on the landing page.

Strategies like these don’t focus on linking blog posts for their own sake.

Here, what you really want to do is link relevant content internally to your website or blog. However, before you place links within your content, you must first find out which ones suit your content the best.

Do internal links help SEO?

As we told you before, this is a highly effective ranking tactic within search engines. It offers thousands of benefits including organic growth. Next, we’ll show you some of the most important ones in three sections:

• Interlinking helps search engines to easily understand your website’s structure

These linked pages on your blog or website help Google to understand how relevant your content is. According to this search engine, “some pages it already knows because Google crawled them before. Other pages, Google discover when following a link from a known page to a new page.”

Besides, these linked pages within your content can help you show the contextual relationship between two pages. This can be a way to showcase your experience on the topics you speak and offer.

It’s simple, if you don’t show your readers other material relevant to them, they won’t find them. Besides, if you want to improve your rank, you must make your visitors stay as much as possible. Another element that can help you to climb among the first Google searches is the increase in visitor traffic.

• Internal links pass authority

A correct internal linking strategy helps to pass authority between the pages of your website. For this, some positioning algorithms take into account the quality and importance of blogs. If your site or blog has a good reputation from either of these two, your website may get awarded. Thus, achieving better positioning.

When we refer to pages that have authority, we mean how much relevant and reliable information these sites offer. It isn’t just about publishing the same thing as many other portals. The real work will fall on how much of this information is real, up-to-date, reliable, and relevant to your target readers.

If you work hard enough to deliver innovative and attractive materials to your visitors, you can take advantage of this as a strategy to improve your positioning.

• Internal links help users navigate between relevant pages

This interlinking strategy is excellent for improving the experience (UX) of readers or visitors. This allows them to find interesting and relevant content to continue their online experiences. Besides, it will make your readers remember you as an expert on a specific topic.

On the other hand, this works as an excellent way for a user to go from one page to another. On this other page, they can buy a product that they are attracted to or need. It’s also a wonderful way for content to expand for the reader and delve into different topics.

Finally, internal linking can help increase the average length of time people stay on your website. This way, you can easily take advantage of the improved UX experience. Thus, achieving a good rank and increasing the overall search performance.

Know the different types of internal links

To continue learning how to do internal linking of a website, you must know about its types. There are two types of internal links that you can use within your content.

These are navigation links and contextual links. Here we’ll show what they are and how to use them among your content:

• Internal navigation links

These are the most popular among those who use the strategy.

They are those that define the navigation structure of the entire website.

Most people use them through the entire website to guide users to find every element and content they need.

• Contextual internal links

Contextual internal links are those that we often see within the content of the main page.

They are attached within the body of the writing and their words are often of a different color.

This way the reader can easily spot them visits them while not interrupting their reading. 

How is a website structured internally?

User experience has become one of the most important aspects of the internal linking process. As a result, to not affect it, you must place your links simply and intuitively. Otherwise, you will only lose visitors. To avoid this, the easiest way to create an internal website structure is by creating the main menu. This, in turn, must have a design adapted to the tastes of webmasters.

Elements such as internal web structures remind us that the usability of your site is one of its most important factors and should be the backbone of the design. Many pages use so-called site maps or systems, to break down their content. This map allows you to create an attractive and organized website by ranking content according to its importance. For example, it can show the points of the blog to visit, their categories, and any kind of content the reader would like to see.

Although the creation of search menus within each website is very common, you can also create internal hyperlinks to link, as we mentioned previously.

Use internal links to pass in SEO

Thanks to this guide on how to do internal linking on a website, you already know that internal links are one of the most important elements of a website. By adding them to your website, you will be carrying out “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO by different webmasters. These, in turn, can specialize in link building, impact, or content innovation, among others.

These factors are what will help you to get a better score within search engines. Although for some time, updates have made it difficult to create link linking strategies, they continue to have a great impact on the growth of your website.

That’s why, today, many website managers don’t only focus on keyword strategies but also internal linking. Hence, its presence on this guide on how to do internal linking on a website.

Why are internal links so important?

Even if we already listed some reasons why internal links are so important for the growth of your website, we can’t stop highlighting their effect on SEO.

After all, these links are key to reach the top of the search results page in a schematic way.

Links within sites can function as a strategy to strengthen a link or the subpages of your website.

Each link placed within your content will help you to strengthen the main link.

Finally, it gives you credibility with readers.

Learn to audit existing internal links on your website

Another key aspect within this guide on how to do internal linking on a website is auditing your internal links. Almost all websites work with some type of internal link to some extent, unless it’s a blank website. However, you should think about placing each link strategically. It’s almost like playing chess, each of your moves can ensure success, and each detail that you overlook, defeat.

On the other hand, you cannot start working on an interlinking strategy if you know the terrain where it will be implemented. Before you start creating any positioning tactic, you should take a few seconds to perform an analysis of the current state of the page. Discover their weaknesses, threats, and what those opportunities that they overlooked at some point are.

Make a diagnosis of the website you are going to work with and then create the best interlinking and external linking strategy. Both will help you grow in search engines and position yourself as a connoisseur of the topic you’re handling.

Ways of auditing links are classified into three main sections:

• Page crawl depth: with the help of page crawl you can get the depth information about crawling your own page.

• Internal links: identifies which pages don’t have internal links or which need to be updated.

• Internal link problems: unlike the previous ones, this refers to discovering which links have problems, can’t open or mark some type of error.

How many internal links do I have to create?

Most often than not, we all want some magic formula or exact guide to what and how to do it. However, like all elements within marketing and website development, there’s no exact formula or recipe for what to do.

So, there’s no exact number of internal links that you must place in your content or blog. What we do know is that excess of these can affect your website’s user experience, and not in the best way. What’s important is to keep your users interested in your website. Because of this, if you place way too many links, you will only make them leave.

As a rule of thumb, you should add an internal link every 100 words. However, before asking how many should you place, first ask yourself if these links will add value to your reader or offer a better visiting experience. This process isn’t just about placing links without reason, you must only add them to your content if you think they will benefit your reader.

Tips for creating internal hyperlinks

Now that you know what’s internal linking, it’s time that you learn how to do internal linking on a website. Here are some tips you should have in mind when adding internal links to your content:

• Link juice inheritance: The link power, especially in the case of highly reputable websites, can be very high. What’s important to work on is making sure that one way or another, all your links end up taking your readers to your home page. They say that all roads lead to Rome, but on the web, all roads lead to the home page!
• Horizontal hierarchies: This way of doing interlinking must work in an organized, simple, and hierarchical way where the main page is the home page. If a subpage is 10 clicks away from the central page, it will score worse than those that are only two to three clicks away. This is why we often see on many websites different kinds of menu items. If you want to create one, make sure to not place it too deeply from the main page.
• Position and appearance of the links: Artificial intelligence or bots can infer which the most relevant links within the structure or design of a subpage are. What we mean by this is that those hyperlinks or links that are visible to a greater number of people, will be taken as more important. If your link is inside an image, it will be classified as a minor link compared to one that is in the middle of the body of the content. If you really want your links to not go unnoticed, remember that their positioning within your blog or your website is crucial. Try to work with a different color than the one you have within the entire palette or an underline to make it more noticeable. 
• Context: Another element studied by search engines and algorithms is the relevance that links have with the content they offer. If your page wants to link to content about any of your products or service, you must mention it a few times within the body of the content. Otherwise, it will appear that the text and the link have nothing in common. On the other hand, be careful with those repeated links, try to place them throughout your page while not going overboard with them. If you do this, your content will seem repetitive and overwhelming in the eye of the reader.
• Breadcrumbs: Navigation of this type works like a path left by breadcrumbs. It works linearly and has the peculiarity of attracting readers from one page to the next. However, for this to happen both of these pages have to be related. For example, if you have a fashion blog, your visitors could go from the main page to the pants section.From there, they could then go to the shirts page and so on. This way, they will be going through a chain of links. This is great because it allows the reader to spend more time on your website. Added to this, it also promotes your site as a trustworthy one among others in your field. All of this, in turn, leads to a good rank on the search results page.
• Links to images with alternative text and title: If you to add a link within an image on your website, you must remember to add descriptive and alternative text to it. This way, you can let your visitors know about the content of the image and why it’s there.
• Discard bad or superfluous links: If your site has many errors like 404, you must be alert and optimistic about each or dismiss them. Don’t forget that search engines also study your site to see if you meet their standards. If you don’t, you won’t show up in their results, and your site won’t get enough traffic.

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