Internal Linking Structures; Most business owners and marketers understand the important of unique content and link building when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO). However, the importance of internal linking structure is still a lesser known but vital ingredient in a successful SEO strategy and improving the visibility of your website. A huge investment of time and finances is spent on external link building exercises, to encourage search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to place your site high on the search results. However, in the competitive online world, a big difference to SERPs can also be made through developing the internal structure of your website. Looking at page depth is very important.
The further from the home page the desired destination page is within the website, the lower in the SERPs this page will be. So if there are lots of links and a heap of navigation to be contended with before the page can be found from the home page, this page will be ranked low in the search results. This is because the search engines give more priority to pages that can be linked directly from the home page because it assumes they are more important.
Content that is deeper into the site is assumed by the search engines to be less essential and therefore gets rated much lower in the SERPs. With this in mind, the entire information architecture of the website and navigational structure needs to be thought through very carefully to maximise SEO opportunities. If you are developing a site from scratch, look at where you can include links to the most important pages from your home page. The higher up the page these links are, the more priority the search engines will give them.
If you have an existing website, it is worth reviewing how important pages of your site are ranked within SERPs. If a vital page is ranked low, you can look at whether you can change the links so that users can navigate directly to that page from the home page. This should increase that page’s visibility on search engines. Using the search engine keywords for the links will help even further. For example, if you have an online retail website, you will have some products that are popular or that you want to push sales on.
You can include a ‘Top Products’ section that links to these selected products from each page in your site. It is important to concentrate on just the most important pages. If you create a link to every page from every other page on your site, the search engines will soon realise this and your website will become very unfriendly to use. When you realise the potential of internal linking structure, you will see that not only will it improve the SERPs for key pages within your website, it will increase visitors. With well-positioned and engaging pages and call to actions, this will lead to conversions into sales. Not only is a well-optimised internal linking structure very important for SEO, it makes it easier for visitors to use.
With so much competition online, good SEO Experts will help you to take any advantage you can to stand out and increase brand awareness and sales.