Internal Link Strategies

1. Internal Link Strategies An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Both your users and search engines use links to find content on your website. Your users use links to navigate through your site and to find the content they want to find.

2. Why Internal Links are important for Seo • 1. Internal links build your pages’ authority. • 2. Internal linking makes people stay longer on your site. • 3. Internal links work to create a good site architecture.

3. Types of links • Navigational links:-Navigational links are used to help users navigate through your website pages. They are site-wide links that define what kind of structure your site has. • Contextual Links:-Contextual links are your content links pointing to related articles and topics. Thanks to contextual links, your pages get better linked internally, so users want to read more and stay longer on your site. Thanks to that, you reduce the bounce rate and increase user engagement.

4. Types of links • No follow Internal Links:-It is quite common to have the nofollow attribute to disguise an unnatural link to an external domain. The same way some people use nofollow on internal links. For example, nofollow tags are added on comments to avoid user-generated content with spammy links that might disrupt the site authority. • Do follow Links:-Dofollow links are those that allow Google and other search engines to point back to your website or blog. So, every time you insert a dofollow link on your site, it can point back to you, which strengthens your authority by showing search engines what other sites, blogs, and posts are linking to you. • Help Links:-This is a good place for contextual links that lead to context-specific resources with useful information related to the topic of the source page.

5. Some Important Internal Link Strategies • 1. Keep a shallow website structure. • 2. Make sure all the important pages are linked. • 3. Keep the number of links per page reasonable. • 4. Make sure image links have alt attributes. • 5. Place contextual links within the main content. • 6. Target Low volume Keywords with Internal Links

6. Keep a shallow website structure • It is considered a good practice when each page can be reached within three clicks of the homepage. Nowadays, users are very demanding when it comes to the speed of websites, including page load time and the time required to complete certain actions. Why should one bother to get through tens of unnecessary links if there are plenty of similar websites out there with well-organized and efficient internal pages? Thus, it is crucial to reduce the number of clicks it takes to get to important landing pages and to maintain a shallow website structure:

7.  Make sure all the important pages are linked • These days, search engines rely on both sitemaps and links to discover web pages. It means that even unlinked pages (otherwise known as orphan pages)  can be found by the search engines as these pages are listed in the sitemap. But it's impossible to find an orphan page through the website's navigation. Such pages virtually don't exist for the users. It's a good idea to get rid of orphan pages — by creating internal links to them from other pages.

8. Keep the number of links per page reasonable • The more links, internal or external, are found on a page, the less link juice each link sends to the page it points to. Moreover, unless the content is well-structured, it may be boring for your visitors to scroll down an endless list of resources. Thus, if you want to send more 'ranking power' to pages you link to, reduce the number of outgoing links. 

9. Make sure image links have alt attributes • The alt attribute of image links acts like anchor text for text links — so it's another opportunity to send a ranking signal to search engines, increasing authority while you're at it.

10. Place contextual links within the main content • The links placed within the page's content have a higher SEO value than the ones in the header, footer, or sidebar. The latter has more to do with navigation, and it looks like Google treats those as non-editorial links. Link in the main content, on the other hand, adds new information and value to the text. Furthermore, the text and keywords surrounding content links also matter for the ranking of the target page.

11. Target low-volume keywords with internal links • Instead of targeting a few high-search-volume keywords, you may prefer to hunt for many long-tail, low-search-volume keywords. In most cases, they belong to the bottom level of a website, e.g., individual blog posts or product listings.