Creating good and efficient internal links throughout web content is probably one of the most neglected areas of search engine optimization. It’s a small, but powerful detail to help both search engine crawlers and your website visitors get around your site with ease and go deeper into your site to explore more of your content.
Moves crawlers deeper into your site
When search engine crawlers visit your site, they index individual pages and try to find clues about the pages. One way to offer up this information is creating text links describing the destination. For instance, a click here link offers no new information to a crawler, while SEO copywriting tells the search engine what kind of information it is likely to expect when the link is followed. Not only is the text link helpful to the crawlers, but to your site visitors as well. Text links are both crawler friendly and visitor friendly. What more could you ask for?
The most neglected place for text links is the navigation menu. Take a look at several websites as well as your own and what do you see for navigation links? Probably something like this: Products, Services, Resources, Contact. Creating informative navigational links such as Electronic Marketing Products and SEO Copywriting gives the search engine crawlers and your visitors a little more to work with when trying to find information on your site.
Find as many opportunities as you can to create meaningful text links throughout your site to lead crawlers and visitors deeper into your rich content. Avoid the dreaded Click here link.
Improves organic search engine rankings
While internal text links won’t rocket your website up the search engine rankings immediately, it is one more detail you can implement to continually improve your search engine optimization efforts and rise above your competitors. Many websites suffer from internal linking neglect by not having enough or by allowing broken links to remain.
Leave breadcrumbs
If your website is more than three levels of navigation deep, meaning a visitor can go at least three pages into a section, then consider using breadcrumb links to help aid navigation within the site.
Breadcrumbs, or a trail of links, help users understand the page they are on in relation to the rest of the site and it allows them to go back through the trail. Some breadcrumbs even capture the visitors personal viewing history rather than relying on the back button to retrace steps to a previously visited page.
Here’s an example of hierarchical breadcrumbs. This type of trail shows the structure of a website section and the path back to the main page of the section.
Products 4 Digital cameras 4 Nikon 4 D60 Digital SLR Camera
The second type of trail link is Path breadcrumbs showing the path actually taken to the destination page, which allows visitors to retrace their steps back down the trail.
Internal linking is an attention to detail that help move your site up the organic search rankings. Continually add links, improve the meaningfulness of the links and make sure all are operable.
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To learn more about search engine optimization:
In the dark about search engine optimization?
How well is your website performing?
10 fast facts about higher organic rankings
Create an SEO blueprint to improve your website
How to gather competitive online data
5 ways to make keywords key in SEO
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