The common wisdom that proclaims contents as the king is something every website primarily focuses upon when trying to hit search ranks. High-quality contents cannot be replaced with anything else, no, nothing except contents builds your core credibility. But when you are delivering contents that are at par with many leading websites regarding content quality that is when the role of links becomes evident. Obviously generating quality backlinks is your second priority as links of authoritative sites of your niche directly transfer the credibility on your website and helps to generate quality traffic.
However, quality contents and backlinks are just not enough. You need to drive traffic from every of your web pages to other pages. To allow visitors reach other web pages with contents of their need and the respective context, it is important to link one page with others in a meaningful and relevant way. While your website contents are continuously growing, the contents that have been published long ago should not be left in the lurch as uncalled for. To make every content more accessible, interlinking is necessary. In more ways than one, it strengthens SEO campaign for a website.
By interlinking your contents and pages with strong links, you can actually give a solid boost to your SEO strategy. Let us have a look at some of the key advantages of interlinking pages.
Better access to contents: Through interval linking users can get enhanced access to other pages and contents easily. Through linked anchor texts they can easily navigate to other pages and posts relevant to the context.
Internal links help to pass the backlink juice across pages: If you have built some quality backlinks but all your pages are not equally getting enough of these backlinks, you can still pass on the juice of these backlinks across all pages by interlinking them with a solid interlinking strategy.
Internal linking engages visitors longer and enhancing page views: Longer a visitor spends on a website navigating from one page to another and browsing contents, more the chances of business conversion increases. Now, interlinked pages and contents help to keep users engaged by offering him other contents related to the context.
Building PageRank and page authority: If some of your pages are ranked higher than the others, their PageRank juice can be passed on to other pages through contextually interlinking them. In the same way Page Authority (PA), an SEO Moz metric for the credibility of a page can also be given a boost by linking pages with low page authority with ones having higher PA already.
Boosting user retention and loyal users over time: Interlinked web pages helps users spending longer duration on the website and over time make them realize the rich content reserve of the website as interlinking frequently allows them finding more valuable contents with related topics and context. This over time positively influences user retention to a great extent.
Interlinking pages helps search engine crawlers easily find your contents: Some deeper pages that are seldom visited can easily be found by the crawler engine thanks to interlinking of pages and contents.
Interlinking is far from a back-door technique to boost page rank in search engine results. It is there to enhance the user experience by allowing easy access to all contents published across pages. So, internal links must be user-friendly and easy to navigate. What are the key considerations in this respect? Let us have a look.
The ideal architecture for internal links looks more like a pyramid with your homepage resting on the crown linked directly with category pages which are further linked with blogs and product pages. Apart from this pyramid-like link scheme, try to maintain interlinking of all the pages with the home page.
Why give a crowning position to your Homepage? Well, since the Homepage is most referred with the representative value for your brand identity it receives the highest share of backlinks. Now by linking Homepage with other pages, you can easily pass on the juice of the quality links to the most number of pages. You need to ensure that all your web pages and posts can be reached just with one or two links from the website Homepage.
The best way to provide internal links to other web pages and posts is to provide internal links through anchor texts in the contents. If you can provide links to other pages contextually within the text content, users can easily be lured to visit the for more in-depth information related to the context. Usually, content links are provided with bold anchor texts to stand out from the rest of the content text. When providing content links the most important thing to ensure is the relevance of the link related to the discussion and anchor text.
Besides providing links through the bold text inside the content, interlinking can also be done with separate links provided inter between paragraphs or just before or after a text content. Such links are openly setting the expectations with text like “Get more tips here” are very contextual while always allowing a visually stand out exposure to the link.
Sidebar widgets are popular for a listing of relevant contents related to a common characteristic or category. The links provided with the list of contents in these sidebars are helpful to guide users to the relevant contents based on the category they are interested with. While a ‘Most Recent’ sidebar will allow them navigating to recent and latest posts, a ‘Most Popular’ sidebar can help users finding the most searched and highly ranked contents.
If a website focuses on business conversion understanding the importance of the call to action is a must. CTAs are also links that normally drive users to actionable areas of the website promoting direct action. CTAs should not only be distinguished from the surrounding, but they should be appropriately designed for easy finger tapping on mobile devices. Design and positioning of CTAs are important for a higher click-through rate of these buttons.
Obviously, you do not want to be penalized by Google for spamming and this is why you should not allow search engine exposure to certain contents like comments and similar user-generated contents. To prevent link juice of other pages passing on to these contents you can just provide a rel=”nofollow” attribute on the respective link tag.
Do you need your website be visible to your target audience in search engines and you don't know where to start? SEO audit is the first step to creating an online marketing strategy that really works. You will get the analysis and guidelines on how to implement the given recommendations within your website.
Contents and backlink strategy can only be optimised and given a solid ground to stand with an interlinking strategy that enhances user experience and help visitors access more relevant contents in quick time.
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