Did you know that simply using links to other content on your website can improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) page ranking with Google, Bing, and other search engines? If fact, internal links can provide some valuable information to search engines if you take the time to link to related content within your own website.
If you’re using your website to create blog articles for your products or services, it’s a good idea to use links to that content on your main pages and vise versa. This is one of the smartest ways to give search engines a map of how your website is structured.
If you’re not blogging, you should seriously consider doing so. Read my article on blogging for content strategy for better idea of value of blogging.
Why Are Internal Links Important?
Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo all have something in common… they have “web bots” that are busy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week crawling website. These bots arrive at your website and start reading your content. If there are links embedded in the content, they will follow those links and create additional relationships in their search indexes.
Outside & Internal links are important, because the search engines use metrics as related to the content to determine it’s ultimate importance. People sometimes call this “link juice.” If your page has many links, it can increase the importance for search engines, resulting in better ranking. Of course, it’s not always good to try to force links, such as using suspect directories to link to your website. Search engines typically find out about these directory sites that are only there to providing linking, and can result in actually lowering your ranking. Therefore, it’s best to use organic strategies or “white hat SEO.” You can read more about Linking do’s & don’ts here.
Linking Should Be Organized
Just like a road map, your links should have some sort of organization. Your most important content should always have the most links. For example, if you’re a real estate agent, your primary service would of course be the sale or buying of real estate, but you might also offer services like Staging, Rental Properties, Vacation Properties, or Concierge Services. You’re primary pages on your website should includes these services, but you can use sub pages or blog articles to talk about all kinds of details within those services. There are endless opportunities and topics to talk about, and there’s always something new coming up, so it’s a great idea to link these to the categories you have as primary pages.
By doing this, you’re building a case for the search engines to know what content is related, there-by giving your website a larger chance of being found when people type in related search words.
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