Internal linking is the backbone of any site. This is one of the key factors of SEO. Netlinking is also very important in natural referencing. However, internal links help Google understand a site and it’s content. They also make it possible to highlight the most important pages, thus optimizing the distribution of authority. Link organization improves user experience, index-ability, and logical positioning. Like any SEO tactic, the internal linking must be balanced without being over-optimized. To help you out, I propose you to discover an organized internal linking methodology to build an optimized website.
Internal linking and SEO: Targeting content
The more content you have, the easier the construction of your internal linking will be. The idea is to create links between thematic same pages, so it is necessary to have a sufficient amount of content to create an interesting internal scheme. Thus the definition of a web drafting strategy or content marketing will be useful. I advise you not to focus on silos creation tools, stars or others, which promote more confusion than simplicity.
Internal linking and SEO: Using natural link anchors
Although the penalties for over-optimization of internal links anchors are rare, I don’t advise to abuse of it. On one hand because creating too many links can lead to the user confusion which may lead to losing him or her. And on the other hand because repeated links just don’t get clicked. Inquire natural links on content and words at relevant times and by the most advised method: Sometimes , one link is enough! There is no need to create tons of them. In addition Google will take into account the first link if you put several ones in the same page.
Internal linking and SEO: Don’t neglect deep links
In general, creating large depth levels linking is not highly recommended. This means to avoid linking to deep final pages with more than 3 levels of the homepage. However, from another point of view, more the links are deeper, more Google may better index the pages of your site. And this will lead to improve your ranking and boost your internet traffic. Also the deeper pages are not necessarily the least interesting pages. And with a bit of analysis, we often get surprises. It’s not necessary to create links from the homepage, menus or footer. Categories, articles and inner content pages are also important elements to take into account.
Internal linking and SEO: Use links in Follow
In terms of internal links I don’t recommend to create links in NoFollow. NoFollow is used to tell Google not to include links for natural referencing. They can be useful in certain cases, where we do not wish to refer pages (pages with reserved access, pages with interests …). However to create a good internal linking, it will be more effective to let Google index everything.
Internal linking and SEO: Measuring the popularity of the pages
How to be sure that your linking strategy is well built and that you have highlighted the pages you want? Very good question! Several tools exist on the market. I will list 2 tools that can help you measure the popularity of your pages, the first offers the service for free and second needs a payment.
Screaming Frog SEO
The advantage of the free tool is that it’s free! And it does the job very well. This is “free”, so ergonomics needs to be improved, but it’s very simple to handle and use.
OnCrawl
OnCrawl offers greater capabilities and visibility. It has the great advantage of proposing a quality indicator: the InRank. The InRank measures the weight of a page with a score between 0 and 10. The formula takes into account several criteria, such as the number of links and the depth.
So this is it! What is your internal linking strategy? How is your internal linking score?
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