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Understanding and Optimizing SEO Internal Links

November 10, 2020

There are several areas within search engine optimization (SEO) that involve important links, and one example here is internal links. Allowing users to go from a given page within your domain to another page on the same domain, internal links are here for both navigation and several other distinct purposes.

At Be Locally, we’re proud to offer numerous SEO marketing and website optimization services, including internal links, external links and a wide range of other themes to meet your needs. What are internal links meant for, and what are some of the top themes we help our clients hit on when looking to optimize their pages for internal linkage? This two-part blog series will go over everything you should know.

optimizing SEO internal links

Internal Link Basics and Purposes

As we noted above, an internal link allows one to move from page to page within the same domain – your overall website. From a back-end standpoint, they refer to hyperlinks that target the same domain source, only with a different URL.

However, this ability to navigate within a website is not the only important purpose of internal links. They’re also very important for helping you spread your ranking quality out through your website and its given pages, plus for establishing what’s known as “information hierarchy” on the site – part of what allows Google to properly crawl the site and access various links or pages.

Our subsequent sections will go over some general tips on how to structure and utilize internal links to benefit your site and SEO rankings.

Engagement Boosting

If optimized properly, internal links can be a massive tool at your disposal when it comes to increasing engagement. By allowing people to move more freely through your site in organic ways, you accomplish this.

See, not every link is created equal within SEO. Google has analytics that allow it to track how often people are actually clicking your links – if your links aren’t being clicked, Google won’t view them in the same way as those that are getting tons of engagement. For this reason, links should be in prominent, organically-featured locations that make them both easy to find and desirable for people to click. The more value you can provide to visitors with each link, the better their engagement metrics will be.

Not Just Text

We’re going to keep hitting that theme: Not all links are created equal. If you are adding links by simply copy-pasting some basic text into a page and moving on, Google will notice this – and won’t look favorably on it. On the other hand, if the link has strong context, plus perhaps an image and other elements to make the outgoing page more engaging, the page will be more effective and will be treated that way by Google and other engines. Be sure to add rich levels of detail to links wherever possible.

For more on internal links in SEO, or to learn about any of our SEO, web design, social media marketing or other services, speak to the staff at Be Locally today.

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