In our web agency we often speak with clients who for years have neglected this part and believe that they have to entrust everything to link building when in reality if they optimized the texts already present on their site, they would obtain incredible results.
Obviously, however, everything must be done correctly and by expert hands. Internal links don't have to be randomly placed just to be there, but they should be really useful for your users' navigation.
What internal links to improve?
Obviously the internal links to strengthen will be those that will later have a Call to action for conversion or in any case that bring income to your company. Normally these pages are the ones that organically receive few links. It is difficult for someone to “naturally” link to their lead generation page or where they start their business from.
The pages struggling for links are usually the most important pages on your site: product and category pages. While you appreciate your product pages and think they are important, that doesn't mean other sites will rate them. Because these pages are self-service, they don't offer the kind of value that compels other sites to link to you.
Through internal links, however, this can be done and is very natural in the eyes of Google. Also because you are telling the user that that page is what they are looking for and can only increase the user experience.
So the big secret would be internal links?
As always in SEO, a total strategy is what then brings traffic to the site, but several tests that we have carried out over the years at our SEO agency have shown that by greatly improving internal links, there is a need for a different and under certain link building less aggressive aspects. As with all things, sometimes looking at what we have can make a difference.
Why do internal links also make a difference in link building?
Generally, when we do link building on some sites, we contact other administrators who accept our proposal, as long as our publication depends on the site where we will publish:
- Informative or educational
- Fun and multimedia
- News
Rarely will a site owner agree to link directly to their product page because needless to say, this would really force their hand.
How to optimize internal links?
This answer is easy, but no one usually thinks about it. Using internal links within a page linked from other blogs or other sites, you can distribute some juice. This, as we said before, must be done on pages that convert and that can increase your business.
This image below is the structure that MOZ's Rand Fishkin recommends following and is certainly the one we believe is the most valid.
Therefore, make internal links but with knowledge of the facts or the links must be useful to our user. Many SEOs still bombard their pages with internal links with the same anchor text and obviously if this is not useful for their users it is almost completely useless or at least over time things could change and Google could make adjustments that will restore the use correct unnecessary internal links.
Currently there are no sanctions in this regard but the advice we always give is to always work in the correct and "clean" way!
No, not at all, we are not actually talking about these links, but rather those that are within the body or text. Google knows very well which links are there just because they are present in the footer or perhaps in the wordpress side widgets. We are absolutely not referring to this type of link, but to those that can lead the user to delve deeper into a certain topic.
Do you want the anchor text for your internal links to be descriptive and clear? Anchor text for internal links should be explicit on the landing page visitors will visit and encourage them to explore your site further. If you want people to find your conversion pages, make sure you link to them appropriately within your site.
