Beginner’s Guide to Using Internal Links on Your Website

Digital marketing and SEO are both strategies that businesses must utilize to maximize their online presence. As we’ve already talked about in our article on digital marketing, links such as backlinks are incredibly important when it comes to optimizing your website. Now, one strategy that’s often overlooked when it comes to optimizing your website is internal linking.?

Despite being a simple concept, there’s a lot more to internal linking than meets the eye. In fact, you may actually not be using internal links optimally, and this can hurt your website and negatively influence your online visibility.

To help you out with this, we’ve prepared a beginner’s guide to using internal links on your website. Hopefully, this clears some things up and will help you make the most of your online platforms:

What Are Internal Links?

An internal link is any link on your page that links to another page on your website. They are useful because users and search engines alike use links to find content on your site.?

Internal links make it easier for your users to find relevant information and will make it easier for them to navigate your site. Search engines, on the other hand, won’t be able to find a page if there are no links to it. This makes internal linking vital when it comes to optimizing your website, which is why you’ll want to use them whenever it’s relevant to do so.

How to Use Internal Links?

Now, this doesn’t mean you should be randomly adding internal links to all pages. When it comes to internal links, there is a right and a wrong way to utilize them.?

A good way to use internal links would be to link to the most important pages on your website. This helps drive up the traffic to these pages, which can be particularly useful for pages that are hard to find on your site. Another thing that you’ll want to do is to link shallowly, meaning that you shouldn’t be burying pages three links deep. For the most part, you’ll want to make sure that any important pages are no more than three links away from your homepage.

What Should You Avoid When Using Internal Links?

One harmful practice you must avoid is adding too many internal links on one page. People may avoid clicking on any of them, as the links tend to look rather spammy. To add to this, search engines will penalize your page and place less authority on the links if there are too many of them on one page. Now, there is no hard rule on the number of links to include on one page, but a good way to go about it is to add internal links only when they are relevant.

Another point you’ll want to focus on is the anchor text. You’ll want to avoid using generic anchor texts like “click here,” as they don’t really show how a page is relevant to the content on the page. Similarly, you also won’t want to over-optimize your use of anchor texts. While making use of keywords in the anchor texts is important, be sure that you’re only using them when needed.

Conclusion

We hope this guide has helped you gain a better understanding of internal links. While it can be a little tricky at first, learning how to properly use them will dramatically boost the visibility of your website. Just be sure to keep the tips in mind when you’re optimizing your website, and you’ll be on your way to getting the most out of your online platforms.