Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to another episode of SEO isSeries Not that Hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, hosting, and today I'm going to talk about internal linking, which I kind of surprised myself when I was going back through all the previous podcasts I'd done I'd never done one dedicated to internal linking. I know I'm bound to have talked about internal linking, but, yeah, in passing, on other shows, shows definitely would have been in one of the glossary shows and I know I did one on breadcrumbs, which is kind of a part of internal linking, but I know just talked about internal linking in general.

Speaker 1: 1:46

So here we go, let's talk internal linking. So first of all, we need to clarify what an internal link is. So an internal link is a hyperlink that points from one page on your website to another page on your website. So these are all links within your own website. They're not like external links, which is where you link to a user to a different domain. Internal links keep users within your site and help guidance through your content. So that's to be just be sure. We're only talking about links within your own site. Now why are they important? Well, it's because they serve two real primary purposes for us, right? Okay, so the first one is they enhance user experience. So we internal links are really important for your users to help to navigate around your website. If you don't have good internal linking, then you're not going to be able to guide them to the right content to help them find what they're looking for. Good internal links help keep users engaged and encourages them to spend more time on your site, which is obviously important.

Speaker 1: 2:43

You've got a website for visitors. You want people to hang around, really. Secondly, they help the search engines. They help the search engines crawl. So they help googlebot, which crawls pages. It finds it, you know. Every time it finds a new link, it follows that link to the page that is there. It will download that page and it will follow any links from that page and it uses these links to spider effectively spider around your site. So you've got good internal linking and it helps the googlebot and other search engine bots index your site, find your content and understand structure. And it also helps pass signals around, various signals around your about. You know key things about the pages and the structure of your site and we'll cover all those sort of individually in a moment.

Speaker 1: 3:27

So, um, here's a scenario. Let's think of one. Okay, so you've got a website about, um, it's all about pet care, okay, and so your user lands on a page about how to care for a new puppy. If you've included internal links to related topics like best food for puppies or puppy vaccination schedules, then you're providing clear paths for the user to continue exploring. You know, relevant content around puppies and puppy care, um, and this not only enhances the experience for the user they get to find you know follow-up content to go to. It also provides a signal to the search engines how content is interconnected, because it'll see that you know these pages being linked from the puppy care top page to sub pages within. It is how it's linked and the anchor text that you use for them.

Speaker 1: 4:18

So let's look at why internal links are really important for SEO. So one we've talked about the improved crawlability and indexing. So that's the basic thing, so that the search engine can find and discover and index the pages on your site. If a page isn't linked internally, it becomes what's known as an orphan page. So that's a page on your website with no links to it from anywhere. And if it's got no links to it from anywhere, it's going to be really hard for Google to find it. There are ways around it. You can put them in sitemaps, for example, and Google may well find it then. But without any context of where it sits within your site, how it's been linked to, it's going to be really hard for Google or any other search engine to work out exactly how it relates to other content on your site.

Speaker 1: 5:04

Secondly, you establish your site architecture and the hierarchy of your site. So these internal links help define the structure of your website and show the relationship between your pages, which helps search engines understand which pages are most important. It can start to see which pages are linked from where and which pages have the most links and the most central pages and which ones feed out from it, and this can influence how content is ranked in search results, because it's all related around the third point, which is distributing page rank. So not all the pages on your website will have the same sort of authority which is is distributing page rank. So not all the pages on your on your website will have the same sort of authority, which is defined by page rank. The internal links allow you to pass this page rank from high authority pages to other pages to help boost their rankings. It used to be called page rank sculpting to do this. It's not something you should worry about percentages and things like that, but just be aware that obviously you're going to have some pages on your site that will have higher page rank. Your home page usually is the one with the most page rank because it's the one most likely to have external links pointing at it. So you want to make sure you use that to make sure that you link from your important pages to your next most important pages and from then down, down and down and down, basically to set that hierarchy for the search engines.

Speaker 1: 6:22

Also. Point four it enhances user engagement. So this is by guiding your users to the related content and where you want them to go and the journey you want them to take. Then these internal links are all really important on doing that. So it helps increase the amount of time users spend on your site. It reduces bounce rate bounce rates. It improves overall user satisfaction and these are all positive signals.

Speaker 1: 6:45

We know that google looks at how people interact with sites. You know bounce rates, that kind of thing. You know bounce. You don't want really people bouncing back to the search engine result pages. So if you give people good places to go forward in their journey, you're going to be much less likely to have people have that bounce back. But remember, okay, there's one key thing here. You may be thinking you want to be putting internal links everywhere, tons and tons and tons of internal links. Just be careful you don't overdo it, because if you have too many links it can be counterproductive. You want to. You don't want a cluttered user experience. You don't want to confuse the search engines about what isn't important. So just remember, there's a fine balance to walk, okay.

Speaker 1: 7:29

So how should we implement internal links in a way that's like best practice, so we get the best result for both users and for seo? So first of all, we want to use proper HTML elements. You always want to use the correct HTML tag for links and that's the a tag with a href attribute. That may sound technical, but it's. This is quite essential because sometimes developers will use other elements like divs, spans, buttons, to mimic links, often using javascript to handle the click events. But this can hinder search engines from recognising these elements as links and it can also affect accessibility for people using things like screen readers. Now, it's not that Google won't ever find JavaScript links, and Google will attempt a good job of it, but the very best practice is always use A tags and not anything weird if you can. Even if you want to do JavaScript stuff, make sure that it will always fall back to using HTML if JavaScript isn't enabled.

Speaker 1: 8:26

Secondly, you always want to use descriptive and meaningful anchor text. So the anchor text, that's the clickable text in a hyperlink and it should be descriptive and it should provide context about the page that you're linking to. So you want to avoid generic phrases, like you know, like click here and read more, because they don't really tell you, the reader or the search engine, anything about that page that's being linked to. Instead, you want to use, like descriptive phrases, like you know, dog care tips or best dog food options. This means that you know when a user will understand what they're going to get when they click the link. But also the search engines get that valuable context and those internal links and context you use. That's going to help you rank for those terms that you link for as well. So bear that in mind. Use descriptive and meaningful anchor text. Thirdly, you want to use you want anyone link to relevant content. So you know, ensure your links are contextually relevant. So linking unrelated pages, unless there's a really good reason, can confuse users and it can also dilute the value of those links. So think about what users are interested on the current page and what they might want to read next and try and link accordingly, if you can.

Speaker 1: 9:38

Fourth, you want to prioritize your important pages. So you want to identify the key pages on your sites, those that are the most important for whatever the goal is of your website, and you want to link to them more frequently and this again will help signal to the search engines that these pages are the most valuable on your site. Next, you you want to avoid overloading pages with links, like I said earlier. So while it is important and it's good to internally link, too many links can be overwhelming. There is no sort of hard and fast rule on how many is too many, but links should be helpful and not over clutter the page. So you want to aim for a balance that enhances user experience versus SEO signals. You want to ensure that all important pages are linked, so you want to avoid the orphan pages we spoke about earlier. You want to make sure every page on your site is linked from at least one other page. This means that people will find it and so will the search engines.

Speaker 1: 10:30

You want to use a logical site structure, so you want to organise your content hierarchically, with categories and subcategories. So some people might call these pillars and sub-pillars, or clusters and sub-clusters. But you want to think about how your site is set up so that you've got logical groupings of pages. And this structure helps make your internal linking more intuitive and it helps the search engines understand your site's organisation. And the best way the next tip, the next way, is to implement the breadcrumb navigation so you'll have seen these on sites like a secondary nav that shows users the location within your site's hierarchy, and this helps users because it helps them find where they're on the site and it also helps the search engines to crawl. There's actually um, you know, complete schema markup for breadcrumbs. Do look at that. Go and listen to the episode I did on breadcrumbs to learn more about that.

Speaker 1: 11:21

You want to use footer and sidebar links really carefully. So these are common places for internal links. Use them. You do use them, but only include links that are genuinely helpful to the user. Think about these should really be your core category pages in and continuing footers and sidebars rather than, you know, overdoing it. So when it comes to common mistakes people make when implementing their internal links, here are some of them. So these are things to try and avoid.

Speaker 1: 11:48

So avoid using vague anchor text. Avoid those kind of non-destructive phrases like click here or read more, because they don't provide context and they can frustrate users who are scanning for specific information. Don't link to unrelated content. Don't link pages that aren't relevant to each other. It can confuse users and the search engines could possibly consider it to be manipulative. Don't hide links. Make sure your links are visible and distinguishable from regular text. Hiding links makes them difficult to identify, which means people can find them hard to use and the search engines could see this as manipulative if it's overdone. So be careful there. Don't over over. Optimize anchor text. Like I said, it's good to include keywords, but stuffing anchor texts with keywords can look spammy. So keep it natural, keep it user-friendly, don't overdo it, don't don't raise spam filters.

Speaker 1: 12:37

Essentially, don't ignore mobile users. Okay, because mobile users they've got a smaller device. If links are too close together, it can be hard for them to, you know, distinguish between links or to actually select links they need to use. So just consider that when you're looking at your your, how your site works in the mobile sphere. Don't forget to update links if you make site changes. So if you ever do a site redesign or you change urls, you need to update your internal links. Broken links can lead need 404s, which is bad for both users and SEO. So if you do make major changes like that, make sure that the page URL changes. You find everywhere that links to that original URL and change that URL, or ensure that a 301 redirect is in place for the old URL to the new one. Finally, don't over link, don't include too many pages on links on a single page, because again, again, this can overwhelm users, can dilute the value of your links. So focus on quality over quantity.

Speaker 1: 13:32

So yeah, to wrap up, the key things here I want you to take away from today's episode are make sure your internal links enhance user navigation. Make sure they help users find related contact and keep them engaged and, you know, keep them on your site. Remember that they aid search engine crawl and indexing. So proper internal links ensure that search engines can find and index all your important content. Use those proper HTML elements. Always use the a tag with a href attribute for links so that you're accessible and that you're crawlable even if JavaScript's not enabled.

Speaker 1: 14:03

Remember that your anchor text matters. Use descriptive, meaningful anchor text and make sure it provides context to both users and search engines. Link strategically. Connect your relevant pages. Prioritize important content. Avoid overloading pages. Use breadcrumbs, that kind of thing Also. Finally, maintain your links. Make sure you watch out for broken links. When URLs change, update to the new one and remember internal linking is a really powerful tool.

Speaker 1: 14:29

Okay, these are links that you control. You control the anchor texts, you control your site architecture. So this is where you are completely, completely in charge and you can do the very best that you can make a big difference to how users see your site and how search engines see your site. So it's a really important thing to think about. Okay, so that's it for today. I hope you find it useful and remember until next time keep optimizing, stay curious and remember seo is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 15:01

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my seo tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that Ed is spelled with two d's. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson on both.

Speaker 1: 15:16

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform Keywords People Use keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority and finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimise and continually refine your content with targeted, personalised advice. Advice keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo. Is not that hard.