Internal Links SEO – 12 Pro Tips for Killer Internal Link Structure

Whether you want to refresh existing website, launch a new one or restructure existing content, internal links SEO is an integral part of all these efforts. Yes, that is the power of internal link structure. Tactful internal linking SEO can add enormous value to your website optimization efforts.

In SEO internal links are the primary to make your website user friendly by designing immaculate navigation. So, there is no way you can overlook internal link building and your internal linking structure. Website internal links are the links that connect multiple web pages.

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If you do not have a proper internal linking strategy, you will just lose a great opportunity to fast track your SEO efforts. Often, websites will leave their users thinking “how to find internal links in a website”. This can be dangerous. Sound internal linking strategies will help you to create extremely user-friendly website.

To cut the long story short, if you follow internal linking best practices and make effective SEO linking strategies, then you are all set to taste success in this content-focused SEO era.

By now you will be clear about “what is an internal hyperlink”. Now let us move on to the best practices to create great link structure. This is one of those internal links SEO efforts that adds value to your website.

Internal Links SEO for Killer Internal Link Structure

Here are 12 essential interlinking SEO best practices that boost your internal links SEO efforts and assures great results. In this blog, we will help you to gain a detailed understanding of the concepts behind internal links SEO and the tips to follow while designing your internal link structure.

Let us now look into each of the internal links SEO best practices that help you achieve assured results.

1. Focus Strongly on User Experience

Yes, there is no alternative to being good to website visitors and search users. Never present users with elements that are harmful for SEO. These include several short ads above the fold, disruptive interstitials and thin content to name a few.

All these trigger users to bounce back to search results page they were previously browsing. No matter how well you add value proposition for your website visitors, if they are unable to find it out then you will never be achieve your business and marketing goals.

2. Play to Get Search Engine Rewards

This is very important. Search engines hugely emphasize on actively rewarding those websites that work to provide a great user experience. This is mainly because search engines care a lot about the end users – the searchers.

When search users turn to search engines, they look at the top of the search results page because this is where they will be presented with the best results that are relevant to their search and also value.

With several data points explaining how exactly search users interact with the websites and the search results, the search engines will fine tune the algorithms solely based on the user user experience elements. Now this my friend, is only expected to shoot up over time.

Automated Algorithm Updates and machine Learning Add to It. With the rise of these technologies, search engines are becoming all the more intelligent. Apart from the ranking signals that Google has already specified in its updates, it is also essential to align your web content with the conversion goals of your business.

One great way is to have great content that simply keeps on leading through your customer journey as well as sales cycle. When you do this, you are automatically gearing up for the chance to retain your website visitors on your website.

3. Maintain a Link Value Flow

Never overlook the link building aspect when links get to your website. Link value gets passed on from one page to another within the website based on some specific logic. So, it is important for you to keep a track of the channel from where inbound links make their way to your website.

This is critical and the next important aspect is to set up the structure of your website to make sure that you do not end up diluting the value on your landing page.

This can be achieved by streamlined navigation, without spilling dozens of links throughout every web page. Your internal links SEO strategy must align with your web content, its structure and where exactly you would want to channelize your link value.

4. Hierarchy and Context

Do not hesitate to get your website visitors to scroll or click. There is no need to have all the deep-dive and technical content on the very first page or on the immediate second level of the web page.

Try to structure your website content around different topics and then focus on prioritizing what goes to the top of the funnel versus what remains several clicks deep. Unlike the old SEO days, you need not have a web page for every keyword.

You can retain a natural structure for your web content from a top level and then develop topics within the existing topics on your website. This will ultimately help you to rank higher. Having a good hierarchy for your web content is extremely important.

This helps you to provide topical relevance and ensure your web content is logical to navigate and well organized. Stakeholders is the biggest challenge you might face within your organization or the organization of your client.

5. Have Unique Web Content

Unique web content is essential to provide great user experience and develop a strong brand value. Search engines will quickly filter out all the duplicate content in their lists.

So, if you have content that is similar to what others also have, then it is difficult for you to cut through the commodity status and emerge as an authority in your industry sector or niche. However, there are some reasons to have duplicate content, which include the following:

• Businesses in highly regulated niche will generally have enormous content that is similar across different websites. They will have to own their company in different ways

• In case of e-commerce retailers, they will have same products across different categories, which will ultimately have same product descriptions. These will be the same across various websites

So, you can just acknowledge areas that have duplicate content and use tools such as Copyscape to analyze how grave the issue is.

6. Planning Your Canonical Use

Once you figure out what should be navigated around, you can quickly plan the usage of your canonical tags for all the similar and duplicate web content pages, pagination on your website or language variations.

You can then use your site map to understand as soon as you layer on canonical web pages and the URLs to which the search engines are being sent from specific sections. This can get tricky in e-commerce because you will inadvertently hiding a product category. So, please plan it carefully.

7. Crawling and Indexing

All your efforts will go waste if you do not ensure a crawlable navigation and code only the necessary sub and primary navigation into every page. By adding unnecessary navigation to your web pages you will only waste your crawl budget and lose your focus.

The key is to get search engines to view all your content and make it easy for them to understand the linking structure between the web pages. If you do not maintain crawling focus, you cannot get search engine bots to specific pages. Ultimately you will losing out a huge opportunity to get ranked.

8. Target Highly Linked-to Pages

While creating an internal linking strategy, begin by visiting Open Site Explorer. Make a list of all the highly linked-to web pages on the client pages and drop it to the SEO pages. These are the huge link equity reservoirs, from where you can harvest and distribute the link juice effectively.

9. Interlink All the Target Landing Pages

This is an incredible idea to scale up the link building efforts. Interlinking the target landing pages on your website will help you to scale up your efforts because every time you build links to SEO landing pages link equity flows to the other pages on your website.

This effortlessly multiplies your efforts. The simplest way to interlink these web pages is to just keep a list of all the “related links” in a sidebar or at the end of your web page.

10. Have Links on Your Home Page

Now home page is the one that is most linked to on your website, so it should be your target to tap equity. Moreover, anything that is interlinked from your home page will send a strong signal of authority and trust to the search engines and explains that your business places maximum value on these pages.

11. Place Links on Pages with Higher Information Architecture

Pages having high information architecture are not necessarily the highly linked to pages on your website. However, these pages are just a click away from your home page. So, it means that higher link equity flows from home pages to these pages.

12. Grab Links from Unconventional Places

Pages “off the explored path” can be a a great source to look out for link equity. These include Contact Us page, terms of services, privacy policy, etc. Unless you strictly do not want to retain any internal links here, these pages can be a great option.

This is because they are high in architecture and are also do not have other links. Therefore, you will not be competing with multiple other external or internal links for the link juice cache of a web page.

To Conclude

While best practices might change from time to time based on the users’ behaviors, the best way to go about is to focus on what matters currently. Right from managing your link value flow, getting the content hierarchy right, developing a solid UX, having proper indexing, etc. you can position your website for the success.