When creating a website, it is vital to use the correct internal linking structure. Without, your sit will really struggle to rank for a keyword. Having a poor structure would mean that your site is missing out massively on potential SEO gains.
Read on to see how you can best structure your website and get the most out of your SEO.
What Actually is Internal Linking Structure?
Internal linking is simply the linking of your websites pages between each other. There a few varieties that we will discuss down below. You should have internal links on all of your pages, however they need to be the right kind of links. If not, you can potentially damage your website.
The ideal structure would ensure all links would only go to other pages that deal with the same topic. For example, a piece about SEO should like pages about SEO.
Why Does it Matter?
Internal linking matters because it helps direct and point robot crawlers around the website. Robots will always go the homepage and work from there, as the homepage is the most important site. Internal links can show crawlers a way around the website to relevant topics and pages.
Search engines work with the idea of “page-depth.” This means that any page that links from the homepage counts as 1, with the homepage being 0.
If you have pages that do not link to or from other parts of the website then crawlers can not find them and so they will not be indexed.
Internal Linking Structure Can Pass One Pages Power to Another
What pages do you have that rank the best on your website? These pages are probably the strongest on your website and so can be powerful for SEO. This is possibly the homepage if you are unsure just because that is where most links from external sources go to. Due to this, when you put a link on it you will pass some authority to that page.
A good thing to do is to put your website into a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush and see where most of your backlinks go. This will show you your most powerful pages.
Easier User Navigation
Lets say you haven’t done anything to help your internal linking. You just have your homepage set up. Well that’s not going to be great as they will not be able to get anywhere else on the site and will just leave. This is where some sort of navigation comes in handy. You can direct users around your site as you please.
Using internal links correctly can help you make conversions or sales by sending users to where you want them when you want them.
These are the basics you need to know about internal linking structure and how best you can squeeze every bit of SEO power out of your website. If you would like to improve your sites linking structure then just get in touch with us at Meath Web Design.
