A lot of time is spent on building external links. External links are promoted as a great help to SEO, which they are, but it’s important not to overlook the links you have best access to. These are the links within your own site.
Internal linking is an important part of SEO which can often be overlooked. This is a shame, as it’s far easier to solidify your internal links than it is to nurture links from external sites. A site with the right internal structure can score a higher ranking than a badly structured site with external links. Also, internal links are guaranteed to come from the page with the most authority on your business – your own.
Your internal links can help make sure that all of your pages are seen by search engine spiders, build on the keyword density within the site, increase the PageRank of your internal pages and ultimately increase your site’s overall ranking.
It’s even better if your site has been online for some time. A lot of companies approach SEO well into their online campaign. In a lot of respects, this makes for a frustrating time, particularly as a lot of companies seek to optimise their sites as part of their active marketing campaign. SEO results take time to kick in, and there’s nothing more frustrating than waiting for results while your business is counting down the hours. The one area where established sites have the edge when it comes to SEO is that they have a history in the search engine, and this is great for link juice once internal links are fully optimised.
Tweaking your internal linking structure can be a very easy process. Sometimes it’s a simple case of inserting keywords into your links, making it easier for search engines to find the right content within your site. Sometimes, a minor restructuring is in order, which can be a more challenging task.
When examining the internal link structure of your site, consider how it supports the search engine optimisation tactics you have in place within your content. This might sound obvious, but many companies spend a considerable amount of time carefully distributing keywords throughout their content, only to name their video files in numerical codes that will mean nothing to a search engine. Your search engine optimisation should cover code in your pages, content, anchors for links and naming conventions for any folders and file names. Talking to our experts at CBS Outdoor can be a great help with defining the tags that are best for your internal structure.
A good internal link structure is important not only to boost your ranking, but to ensure that all of your pages get the attention they deserve. It’s not much use having a 35-page site if only five of those pages are spidered by the search engines. Shoring up your internal links means utilising the assets already available to you, providing SEO value with relatively little effort.