Internal Linking: The Importance Of Internal Linking On Your Website

When a large part of the business has moved to the Internet, it is essential to have our website ready. And especially the SEO part, which is the one that will offer us more and better results in the long term. But interlinking or internal linking is essential to improve our positioning and appear higher in that list of search engine results.

Sometimes we forget this type of more “technical” and not-so-creative practices or optimizations because we are going fast. We give more relevance to more visible actions that are not always so important for Google, such as simply not doing it correctly. Correct due to ignorance or because we have become outdated.

But What’s this about the Linked Inter not?

Well, it is a technique of vital importance that, in addition to favouring and improving the experience that users can have on our site, we also distribute and build the authority of the web that we are working on.

It is simply about relating different pages within the same domain through links. In the same way that your website has a menu, the home page links the most relevant pages for your business, or within the blog, we add content or related products or other web sections (categories, brands, etc.) with interest in the topic on which we have drafted the post.

However, sometimes we do this without any foundation, without a studied and structured guideline. We are losing SEO authority for the domain and reducing our SERP position. Therefore, it is best to carry out a strategy with an On-Page SEO expert to create this network of URLs and establish which are the most relevant pages and those to which we will target.

What are the Benefits?

Well, we obtain several advantages thanks to interlinking :

• User experience: We will recommend articles, products, or services of interest to the user related to the URL in which they are found. In this way, we will be able to improve the bounce rate, and in the case of e-commerce, we will be able to generate better sales results.
• Distribution of authority on the web: Thanks to the link juice, we will indicate to Google which pages are most important to us. The pages that have the most incoming links will be tracked more times by Google’s “spiders,” rewarding the critical areas for our website.
• Positioning of keywords or keywords: Thanks to the anchor text, we can use the word or phrase that suits us best for that link. With this optimization, we will improve the positioning of certain words we would like to appear.
• Improve traffic and relaunch old articles: If we make an internal link from a new post to an old one or in our online store, we link to a complementary product; we will gain visits to those pages.
• Tracking our domain will be easier: As with our internal linking strategy, we have been creating a roadmap; we will help the bots to do their job to crawl our entire website.

Dofollow and Nofollow Links

Considering these last points, we must bear in mind that when linking on the web, both internally and to other domains, we must remember that there are two types of links and that depending on which one we select, it will have some consequences or others.

• DO follow: with this type of link YES, we would transfer authority between pages
• NO follow: in this case, apart from not giving power, we prevent Google from following it or its algorithm from taking it into account when improving the SEO positioning for that page.

How can i see and analyze the Internal Linking of my Website?

In the first place, we will always recommend that you put yourself in the hands of an SEO expert, who, in addition to having the necessary knowledge and experience, will have more or less complex and complete tools that will allow you to measure different OnPage SEO factors of your website.

Secondly, tell you that Google offers free tools, among them, and to measure the internal linking of the web, you will find Search Console. From the control panel, accessing “internal links” in a couple of clicks, you will be able to know the quantity and destination of your links, as well as the URLs that have the most links pointing to them.

Internal Link Types

Vertical Internal Linking

We will obtain different levels, favouring the link juice, with a well-defined hierarchy and without mixing different web categories, always incorporating related content.

Its use is preferable on websites with different themes, containing keywords with differences in their search volume, for example, in online stores.

Horizontal Internal Linking

In this case, there would be those links that point to the same website from different URLs without there being different levels. For example, when we add links to the same web category from some post of our blog.

Prioritizable for small-sized websites or with a single theme, which has keywords where searches are similar.

Mixed Internal Linking

The fundamental advantage of this type of interlinking lies in the possibility of improving the positioning of those URLs with keywords that are more difficult to the position since they will receive more internal links through a combination of the use of the two previous methods.

Techniques to build my Website

Make a progressive and orderly work. Be patient since it is a job that will be carried out with the growth of your website. Although yes, from the beginning, you have to be clear about your main blocks and then create the content about them. This will ensure that your website’s linking is coherent and is carried out progressively and coherently.

Make yourself a chart. Many times, with technical and somewhat complex things, it helps us to approach it visually. An SEO expert can use some tools to view and analyze OnPage SEO with graphics that draw the structure created with the link.

Pay attention to details. For this, what gives the best results is to keep a record of all the work you are doing, with the details of the pages you are linking, keywords, anchor text, tags you have included (the so-called Hs).

Analysis. The work does not end with the inclusion of the link; it is necessary to monitor and analyze the results that have been obtained subsequently. We must remember that this is not immediate and that it will take a few months to begin to see how we have fared. You should pay special attention to the number of clicks the URLs have achieved and their difference from previous periods. The better positioned it is, the more chances that users will see it, enter it, and may end up hiring your services.

Do not abuse. Keep in mind that what we are doing is “distributing points,” so if we distribute too much at the end, we will be left with nothing. This is easy to understand with an example; Imagine that we send four links from a page with 200 SEO authority points; each one will have 50 points, perfect. Now, if instead of 4, we send 500, they will have 0.4 points of authority.