A lot of website owners underestimate the importance of having a properly optimized website. A website that is not optimized will have low search engine rankings, be hard to navigate, and will ultimately limit how successful it can truly be. One of the most important parts of optimizing a site is to have plenty of internal links that connect pages together. By having plenty of internal links, your site will have much better SEO results and will also be much more user-friendly. Let’s take a look at how exactly internal links will help search engines, such as Google, rank your website.
Spiders Like to Crawl
The way Google is able to find all of the content on the internet is by millions of bots, usually called spiders that just go and crawl all the websites to check for new content. They start by entering the website and will crawl through every page, usually through internal links. If you have some pages that do not have any internal links, you are risking them never being found, ensuring the failure of those pages. If Google can’t find a page on your website, then it won’t be ranked and will be extremely hard for others to find. Don’t assume that just because you have a new page posted on the internet, Google will just automatically have it recorded, that isn’t the way it works.
One of the best things to do to make sure that the spiders can easily find your content is to have a site map. What is a site map? It is a page that is attached to your home page, which includes an internal link for every page that your website offers.
Increase of Average Activity Per Visitor
Including links in all of the content you have on your site to other pages with similar content will really help visitors navigate through the website and also keep them busy for longer. The longer your visitors are on your site, the better, so it is important to make sure they are happy and are kept busy. Make sure not to include links to other pages that have nothing to do with the page they are currently on because they will be more interested in topics that are around what they were already reading. Take a look at this page for a good example of what I was saying. Notice that the recent posts are displayed on the left side of the page and also the internal linking within the article.
You should also make sure that your navigation bar is optimized for user-friendly activity. People will usually use the navigation bar to find a topic they are interested in, so make sure it is organized and easy to handle. Spiders can crawl through the links within the navigation bar, so make sure to include as many as you can without making it hard for visitors to use.
You’re probably wondering how having more people on your site for a longer period of time, helps Google find your pages. Well, the more activity your website has, the more important it is to Google, and they tend to send spiders more often to more important websites than inactive ones. Google also uses visitors to help them determine your ranking, so the more activity your website has, the better.
Keywords as the Text
Another great thing about using lots of internal links is that you will be able to use anchor text to help your search engine rankings and also to make it easy for your visitors to know where the link leads to. If the page you are linking already has a targeted keyword phrase of “Internal Links”, then using that phrase as the anchor text will help search engines know what the content is about before they even enter the page. This helps a lot with keyword rankings. Let me show you an example of good usage of anchor text. In this page, see how the word “”
Using proper anchor texts will also lead your visitors in the right direction, the last thing you want to do is to have a link that says “Internal Links” go to something completely off-topic. While you might think it is a good idea to implement a link on every page that all go to one of your main pages, it doesn’t help. Google knows when you are trying to add too many links to just one page, so just keep it natural. If a link should be placed, place it. Just don’t go trying to spam all of your links to just one page.