When search engines crawl through your website, they are not only trying to find new or updated pages but are also trying to figure our as to what the pages are all about. Internal links or the links from one page to other in the same website gives them this data. If proper anchor texts are used, this data becomes even more meaningful. If the internal links are planned properly then it could help in passing the link authority to some of the important internal pages.
My website has proper internal links. Will it improve my rankings
No. Internal linking is just a small part in your search engine optimization endeavor. However, it is certainly going to give a boost to your website rankings by a small percentage.
Recently I tried to verify the usage of internal links on seo’s firm websites and was horrified to see that their websites were not properly optimized for Internal Links. I saw their main menu links as “Products”, “Services” etc. In place of these one word link texts they could very well use something like “Web Marketing Products” and “SEO Services”. Think of the type of important words they are missing out on.
Meaningful text in links is very important both for search engine optimization and usability of the website. Do consider rewriting all “click here” type of links to something meaningful. It would not only help visitors to browse through your website properly but would also give contextual help to search engine robots.
Some of the important factors to remember for internal link strategy
- Do not loose any reasonable opportunity to link
- Internal link transfers link authority to pages
- Use keyword phrase or meaningful text in your links
- Give importance to linking the most important pages then others
