Websites play an integral part in promotion of businesses and in raising awareness among potential clients. Moreover, they are, in today’s information technology based world, the foremost source of initial information a client is likely to explore. To achieve this goal, it is vitally important to rank considerably higher in Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Search Engines through their crawlers and spiders surf the web and index websites against keywords, phrases and most importantly backlinks.
What are Internal Links?
Internal links are a type of hyperlink that connect different portions of your domain or website with each other. The interconnected items can be other webpages, images, databases or documents etc. Internal links if placed expertly and strategically can assist users in navigating comfortably and can provide an interactive environment thru which the online visitor can quickly gather all “related’’ information. Internal links in addition to providing better navigation for visitors also leads to a better website structure which is a form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In summary Internal Links are beneficial for a webpage because:-
- Better navigation experience for the visitor
- Better page architecture and information flow of the website
- Higher link ranking of the website
How do Internal Links raise Search Engine ratings?
Backlinks are linkages within the websites that act as a reference and consequently; better quality links result in higher SERP rankings resulting in better online traffic. Search Engine crawlers while exploring webpages evaluate the links within each page. ‘Internal Links’ in a website assist search engine in finding different pages of your website and based on the specific keywords, a web page gets indexed and ranked in the search engines keyword based database. Greater the number of qualitative internal links within your website will result in a better and complete exploration of the webpage resulting in higher SERP rankings. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that none of your website’s information is hidden and that all pages and associated data is linked with each other intelligently thus enabling search engine crawlers an easy access to your complete website. Moreover, as the internal links result in a qualitative domain and database structure, the PageRank score by search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.) also gets higher which also leads to even higher search engine rankings.
What can you do?
Many websites created by non-experts create a non-search engine friendly site structure which means that their websites are not properly evaluated and indexed by the crawlers. SEO experts assist in this by re-structuring and strategically linking the information within the website. An ideal website structure should look like a pyramid where everything is linked to the top (homepage) thru appropriate links (and headings). Unnecessary links should also be avoided as they can lead to lower link juice by the search engine crawlers. Search engines generally have a limit of spidering links within a webpage (150~200). Proper, logical, information and qualitative links with the right selection of keywords should be placed. Keyword selection is one of the most important aspects while creating internal links as it would contribute the most towards search engine indexing.
