The primary objective of any website developer is to ensure that his website gets as many visitors as possible. No doubt, SEO content is very important for a website to attain a high SEO ranking. One cannot ignore the contribution of the internal links in this regard. These links play a major part in the overall SEO strategy of any website.
Let us look how to build a robust internal linking strategy for your website. Prior to that, we shall briefly understand the internal linking concept and its advantages.
Internal Linking – Concept
In very simple terms we can say that an internal link is a normal hyperlink between two pages of a domain. It is a simple navigational tool. The easiest example is the connecting between two blogs pertaining to the same context. Let us look at the uses of internal links and their advantages as far as SEO optimization is concerned.
Advantages of internal linking
It is important to understand the advantages of internal linking if you desire your website to have a robust internal link strategy.
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User-friendly anchor texts: They are most useful for internal navigation. Inserting internal links can direct users to different places in the same blog or even to similar blogs on the same domain.
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Have the same influencing capacity: Both external and internal links can influence your Google local SEO a great deal. External links are off page SEO backlinks that your website gets from authority websites. However, internal links have their importance as well.
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Increase page views Intelligently inserted internal links using proper anchor texts combine with quality content and result in a rich experience for the user. This can increase the page views considerably.
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Improve page rank: Google gives you PageRank for every web page depending on the quality of backlinks. The benefit passes to the other pages linked internally with the higher ranked page. This can help you get organic search traffic.
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Reduce bounce rate: Internal links can hold on to the attention of your customers for a longer time. This reduces the bounce rate considerably.
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Enables better crawling / indexing: Crawlers are very intelligent as they scan through all the pages of your content. Having quality internal links ensure a better crawling experience.
Internal links SEO is a very important aspect of the overall popularity of your website. Having a robust internal linking strategy is therefore, the need of the hour. Every website should have quality internal linking strategy to ensure a robust SEO marketing campaign.
Let us now look at how to build a robust internal link strategy. One of such internal linking best practices is the combination of Screaming Frog and Majestic SEO.
Link building can be a time-consuming process. Thus, it becomes imperative to scale your internal links effectively to save time. Screaming frog is one such scaling application having tremendous use in SEO optimization.
Build a robust internal linking strategy
The following steps will help you build up a robust internal linking strategy for your website. An important point to note here is that this process will not work if the keyword is the template of the website. It does work with long tail or secondary keywords.
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Identification of keywords: Identifying the keywords for which you wish to improve the rankings is the first step in this process. Using an internal link checker like Conductor Searchlight is perfect as you can find out the keywords having the most search volume.
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Put keywords in Screaming Frog Custom filters: The second step is inserting the keywords in the Screaming Frog Custom filters thereby enabling the search of the source code of the internal HTML pages.
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Run this application and export the custom reports: The next step is to run the application. It will generate the custom reports within no time. Export these custom reports.
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Get the metrics by doing a majestic bulk upload of all URLs: Upload all your URLs using the Majestic SEO application to get the requisite metrics. The important point to note here is to do the bulk upload for each export. Once you export the results from majestic, you can delete the unnecessary data. The next step is to add another column having the internal link phrase in each export. Combine all the data subsequently.
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Clean your data: There are chances of pages having no links pointing towards a particular page. It can be a waste of time adding that internal link. You can also check out for the link juice. If your page does not have it, you can remove it as well.
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Run the Pivot: Throw this data into your pivot table. This enables you to select the most powerful pages for internal links.
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You can go off on metrics like Trust Flow and Citation flow to allow you to prioritize on your internal linking building.
This is one of the best SEO tools to build an internal link strategy for your website.
Optimize your internal links
Having a robust internal linking strategy is one aspect. You should have an idea about how to optimize your internal linking.
Following these six steps can improve your internal linking strategies thereby ensuring Google search engine optimization. This is a very important aspect of local SEO.
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Segment and focus: Some pages benefit the most from internal link building. Identifying those pages is important. Ecommerce vendors benefit the most when they concentrate on brand pages or the top sales pages. This is good for local seo for small business.
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Build semantic silos: Tagging the right articles that are relevant to the topic can benefit users more.
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Adopt the Wikipedia way: Wikipedia follows one of the best internal linking systems. It is great from the SEO marketing point of view.
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Do not ignore any page: TYou have a developing website. Certain pages can become old and hidden. An effective SEO campaign should not ignore them.
Final thoughts
We have just gone through the internal link building strategy and examined its importance in the local SEO context. These are some of the best search engine optimization tips you can get on this topic.