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Welcome to the independent republic of your website
Yes, don’t worry, you are reading the correct post; If you want to know everything you need to have a good structure of internal links To improve (partly) your SEO, read on.
The good thing about this type of link (the other type is external) is that you can check how they behave, since they are all within your website.
Definition of internal links (internal links)
When we talk about links internal, we are talking about internal links. (yes, I know it’s obvious, but there are people who may think that they are different things).
An internal link defines, in the face of Google’s spiders (the bot that index your website), the quality of the content of your website and what it is about.
Remember that said spiders they move through links (they jump from one to another, and always from higher to lower level) and this determines various factors, such as the relationship between your different pages (thanks to the internal links between them), the theme of your website, the relevance , etc (we see it later in this article).
Basically keep in mind for now, that the stronger the internal link network your website has, easier It will be that Google correctly indexes (and categorizes) your website and positions you before in the search results.
Examples of internal links you already have
For now, internal links may sound a bit strange to you, and it may seem very complicated to do or understand, but you will be surprised to know that you already know and manage the vast majority of internal links on your website.
In addition to the typical links found throughout the text of a page or article, they are also internal links the links that your menu has, the buttons of your calls to action (Call-to-actions), footer or sidebar widget links, forms, buttons on popups, typical footer links (along with the aforementioned widgets) such as Data privacy, terms and services, etc.
Advantages of using internal links
In addition to improving your SEO in general, the main concrete advantages of having a good internal link structure are:
- improve the user experience of the web because they accompany the visitor from one piece of information to another relevant piece of information, in an easy and visual way.
- Increases the credibility of your content in the face of the aforementioned spiders of Google, contributing worth to your website facing the all-powerful search engine.
- They make you, as the author of the articles, more expert in what you speak, since you provide useful information that you have already written in other parts of your website.
- They improve hierarchy of links that are on your website, showing the relationship between the different pages and articles that you have created.
- They increase the weather that visitors are on your website since, for example, someone who finishes reading an article and then sees a link to an article related to the one they just read, is probably interested in continuing to read content on your website.
- improves the conversion opportunity from visitors to customers, in case you sell something (products, premium subscriptions, etc).
This is a consequence of the previous advantage, since the longer someone spends on your website, voluntarily and reading content that interests them, the more options there will be for this to happen. momentum (special moment in which one is more likely to buy something for a specific reason) in which the visitor becomes a leadand through that momentum become your customer.
Internal Links vs External Links
Before delving into how to improve the internal link structure of your website, I want you to be clear about the Main differences between internal links and external links.
Control
At the control level, external links they will always be more difficult to control, because any website can link to yours. At the SEO level, the more popularity an external website that “talks about you” has, the better it will be for you (although you cannot control it).
internallyHowever, you can control the creation, modification, content and direction of the links that exist on your website. All this, and together with a good trial-and-error analysis, will provide you with increasingly better opportunities to improve your SEO.
Authority
When we talk about authority, imagine the typical American movie scene of the quarterback and the nerd: the quarterback it is a popular website, that many people know, and that instills respect and admiration on the part of many visitors; the nerd it is quite the opposite: a website that nobody knows and that does not attract attention.
At the level of external links enough that the quarterback (very authoritative website) I talked right about him nerd (web with little authority) so that little by little the nerd become someone more admired (visited) by people.
At the level of internal linksa website will be able to improve the user experience of all its visits so that the authority is distributed among the pages and articles that interest you.
It is interesting that you read the to understand this concept well.
Place
Regarding where the links appear, mention that the external links that point to your website, usually appear in the content (bodysuit) of a website, and that the internal links they are also found in many other places within your website (which we have already seen above).
Where to start?
Once we have already talked about the theory, we are going to focus a little more on the practicewhich is made up of small steps (tips) to carry out on your website, and that as a whole, will enhance that internal link structure improvement that I explain throughout this article.
Popular pages or posts
Select the pages and articles (or other custom post types that your website may have) more popular (they have more visits). To do this, visit your Google Analytics panel and see what content visitors like the most.
What you have to do now is find (ideally create) new content that talks about something related to the same topic as your most popular articles, and link them to them.
Keywords
Analyze keywords from popular articles or pages. Use them in the new content that you are going to link to the most popular content.
anchor text
Analyze the anchor text of the links. If you don’t know what it is, the anchor text is the text that can be read on the link itself. For example, in the Link Juice article I mentioned earlier, the anchor text is “Link Juice article”.
Although it is convenient to include keywords in the anchor text, it is important not to go too smart here. Always remember that whoever reads your content is a person and that you have to keep the concepts simple and straightforward.
Position
The internal links that appear in the upper part of your content have more strength to improve SEO than those at the bottom.
Relevance
When you include an internal link, it has to be relevant (both for spiders as for the readers). That is, if it is an article about shirts, and you include an internal link, said link must talk about something related to shirts.
Quantity
Now you may be pan-eyed and a wonderful world of internal links has opened up before you, but I have to warn you that the fewer and simpler the internal links the better.
The reason for having keywords from your website linked to other content within your website, at minimal levels, is to avoid creating competition between your own keywords. So have some self-control and do not go over the number of internal links.
Balance
The same goes for balance. You cannot have a page full of internal links to other pages (except for some pages mother like Home), and then have other pages empty of links. The ideal is a good balance and that everything develops Natural way.
Depth
At the user experience level, you will already know that the ideal is that you do not have to make many clicks to reach a specific objective of your website (sell, subscribe, etc.).
However, at the level of internal links, nothing happens if there are certain depth between how the content of your website is related, as long as it is relevant, balanced and natural.
Destiny
Depending on the content behind that link, you may want to make the target of that link open in the same tab (in HTML target=”_self”) or in a new tab (target=”_blank”).
In my opinion, avoid opening links in new windows, as this can confuse the user too much and get lost.
Automations
Beware of plugins that automatically create internal links for you (for example, every time the word White bread link to a wonderful article on white bread you’ve written).
I’m not a big fan of automation when it comes to SEO, so try to do everything little by little but with quality. For me, automation in this case is wanting to arrive too quickly where you should arrive little by little, and in this case it is not suitable.
If there is any automation in terms of internal links, it is what comes next, the inclusion of related content.
related links
Especially for articles (not so much for static pages), it is very good to include a plugin for related posts. Perhaps this is the only automation I like to use.
These related posts can be configured to be suggested from the tags (tags) that has an article, or depending on the category to which it belongs.
This usually works quite well for this rush.
You can also choose to have 3 or 4 related posts appear at the end of the article, or something that works very well today: other related articles appear individually within the body of the article itself.
I really like this plugin.
Create more content
To have a strong internal link structure, the ideal is to have a lot of content and be continually creating new content. You will realize this yourself when you see that little content does not give you much play to link it together (following all the guidelines that we see in this article).
Analysis
Use Google Analytics to see the flow of visits through the internal links of your website. Specifically measure the interactions between the links.
There is a very useful part that shows, as a diagram, how a visitor moves through your website until he leaves it. This tool is called User Flow and you find it in the main menu of Google Analytics.
Links to taxonomies and categories
Do not be afraid to create links to taxonomies and categories, especially if your website is based on many articles on different topics.
The ideal use of this internal link…
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