What Is Internal Linking, and How It Helps Your SEO?
Links to pages within the same domain are known as internal links. In other words, there is an external link, which refers to a link pasted from outside the site.
Internal link optimization can be expected to have the following three main effects on SEO.
① Raise the rating of the page
By building internal links, you can increase the relevance between pages and collect links to important pages.
② Help the crawler patrol
By spreading links throughout your website with internal links, crawlers will be able to crawl through all the pages on your site.
In order for newly published pages to appear in search results, crawlers must come to see the pages.
A crawler visits a page, evaluates the content, and registers the index before the page is displayed in the search results. Crawlers follow internal links to discover newly published pages.
Therefore, if there is no link to the newly published page, the crawler cannot reach the page and evaluate the page. If the crawler can find the newly published page as soon as possible by following the internal link, it will be indexed faster, and you can expect a speedup until it is displayed in the search results.
③Make users stay on the website for longer
Optimizing your internal links will also help your users spend more time on your site. By setting a link to another page related to the page the user first visited, it is possible to prevent the user from seeing only one page and leaving and increase the possibility of moving to another related page.
Although it is said that it is not a part directly related to Seo Services evaluation, it leads to improvement of bounce rate and exit rate. For users, it will be an advantage that it will be easier to collect information on themes that are close to their interests.
Where and how should I place internal links?
Here are four typical locations for internal links.
① Breadcrumbs
A breadcrumb is navigation that shows the site hierarchy to the user who visited the website and intuitively tells them where they are. Crawlers may easily navigate the website because to its straightforward structure, which is also simple for them to understand.
②Common navigation
Common navigation is a menu that is commonly installed on all pages of the website page seo in principle and has the purpose of making it easier to guide users to the desired page. The “global navigation” is installed at the top of the page, the “side menu” is installed on the side, and the “footer menu” is installed at the bottom.
③Site map
A sitemap (HTML sitemap) is a page that summarizes the pages that exist on a website. By summarizing the pages in the site in a list, the structure of the site becomes easier to understand. Both search engines and users benefit from the ease of finding content and navigating the site. Place the sitemap in the common navigation so that it can be viewed from any page. Basically, it is often installed in the footer menu.
④ Inside the content
It is also important to link from within your content to relevant pages. If there is a page related to the content of the page, please set up the link positively. It also makes it easier for users to collect related information, making the site more convenient for users.
Points to note when setting up internal links for SEO
There are four points to be especially careful of when optimizing internal links.
- Normalize the URL
URL canonicalization is to make Google recognize one of the URLs as the canonical URL when two or more URLs exist for one-page content.
Specifically, URL canonicalization is required in the following situations.
- Mixed pages with and without www
- Mixed pages with and without extensions (.php, .html, etc.)
- Mixed pages with protocol names “http” and “https”
- URL with parameters
In the above situation, it is possible that the page evaluation will be distributed to each URL, making it difficult to display at the top, or that it will be considered as duplicate content and difficult to be indexed.
URL normalization is also important to achieve the goal of concentrating links on important pages.
- Set up links from pages where internal links are gathered
Especially for pages that you want to aim for higher ranking, it is recommended to set up links from pages that already have internal links.
Top pages and category top pages are examples of easy-to-understand pages that are easy to gather internal links.
As mentioned above, Google recognizes that “pages with many internal links = pages with high importance”, and the possibility of page evaluation increases.
It is said that links from pages with high internal links and high ratings have a higher impact on the destination page than links from pages with low ratings. Links from pages that are easy for users to access, such as the top page, are easy to follow, and there are fewer steps to reach the page, so they are more convenient for users.
- Establish a link from a highly relevant page
Links from irrelevant pages are considered low-quality links and are not user-friendly. It is necessary to set up links within the website as an internal Link Building measure, but it is important to think first about whether it is easy for users to use.
- Set the alt attribute (when setting a link to the image)
Don’t forget to set the alt attribute when setting links to images such as banners in your blog. An alt attribute is a text that describes an image and is displayed instead if the image is not displayed properly for some reason.
At this time, it is said that it is difficult for Google to understand the content of the image accurately. Therefore, the text is a better way to convey information to Google.
By setting the alt attribute and indicating the contents of the image with text, it is possible to tell Google the relevance of the link destination, even if it is an image. If You don’t know to set up links on your website, you can hire a Professional Seo Services team for your business.
