One of the services provided within Google Webmaster Tools (GWTs) is a report of the internal links, Google has found while visiting your site. Internal linking Optimization is important to any site, Not only does it drive visitors to other pages within the site/blog but also guides the search engine bots to those pages also.
Recently Google published a new blog post in the Google webmaster central blog and I think it’s a very good example to use in order to understand how Google is using internal links. It is good to know because what they are doing in their blogs is not against their own guidelines so someone can say that it’s safe to use as well. So in this article, we will learn about Internal linking Optimization, benefit of the internal link and how to use internal link feature in Webmaster tool to improve internal link structure.
Internal linking Optimization Benefit
Internal links are links that go from one page to a domain to a different page on the same domain. The most important benefit of the Internal Link optimization is to re-update your older post by passing the Link juice through the link to another page. And also help google’s search bot to index your website in an efficient way by providing a path. The benefit of the internal links is following;
- Distributing Link Juice;
- Navigation;
- Better Keyword Targeting;
- Reduce Bounce Rate;
- Proper Indexing of the Inner Post.
Distributing Link Juice
Do not underestimate the power of internal linking. Your site acquires link juice from internal linking in the same manner that you receive link juice from external sites via linking.
The home page of your site is the one that has maximum link juice and page authority of your website. When you point a link from the home page to another inner page, a part of the home page’s link juice flows into the inner page and increase the page rank, authority and making it more likely to show in SERPs.
Navigation
User-friendly or Navigation is the major ranking factor of the search engine algorithm. There are different kinds of internal links that you can have on your website:
- Links in the body text.
- Menu bar links.
- Footer links.
- Sidebar links.
These links are good for navigation, and they are seen as more significant than other types of links in the eyes of search engine bots. Because they are typically placed there for the interest of the reader. If there is a disconnect within the internal linking structure (broken links) the flow of link juice is interrupted. It also affects the indexing of internal pages on the site. It plays the same role as SEO friendly URLs play in Website to design attractive URLs. The Broken Link Fixing is also a part of Internal linking Optimization. Use Broker Link checker to find the broken link on the website. Here is a list of use full WordPress plugin which helps you to Reduce human effort and make your website SEO friendly.
Better Keyword Targeting
Internal linking is 100 percent in your control. You can pass all the juice of the page to particular page or stop passing juice by using rel nofollow tag. It is easier to manage the anchor text keywords you target. Track popular keywords that bring traffic to your website via Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, and use these keywords as anchor text for internal links to further optimize the pages for your targeted keywords.
Reduce Bounce Rates
A good Internal linking Optimization is one way of reducing the bounce rate on your site and also help to increase the Dwell time (average time on site). If you have engaged your audience with great content on your page, they will likely also follow the links you recommend for further reading. This will increase the length of stay on your site (when the links are internal). A lower bounce rate sends a positive signal to search robots about the quality of the content.
Proper Indexing of Inner Pages
Google also Index your website with the help of internal link. If you do not provide internal linking between pages of your sites, there is no way for search engines to crawl and index your site, except through an XML Sitemap. You must make sure that all your interlinked pages are accessible to search engines. There are a few things that can cause inaccessibility of inner pages on your site, even if you have linked them internally. Some of these are as follows:
- Broken links;
- Blocked pages;
- Links to pages only accessible by submission of a form;
- Links to pages only accessible via an internal site search;
- Linking to a page that is included in your WordPress robots.txt file.
Use Internal Link Feature of Google Webmaster Tool
With the help of Internal link report in Google Webmaster Tool, You are able to find,
- How many post are connect to that post;
- Where your particular post links in your older article/post;
- and if they are not linked in any post or have a less link pointing toward them then you can make a link to that post with a latest post which is related to it and reactivate it on google.
first, you have to Create a webmaster tool account. And verify site with google by Submit site in google webmaster tool.
Note: If you just make a new webmaster account than Wait for some days so that google can index at least some of the pages of your site.
Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and check internal link report under search traffic>>Interneal link.
Now try to find the page which has a low link. You can easily find a lot of page with a low link at the bottom of the report because google arranges link in this report in decreasing order.
Click on that link and You will see a list of a link page which is connected to your page. You can check, from where a link is coming to your page. If the link coming from not a related page that is which page is not related to the page or coming from low-quality content than you can delete this link if you want.
Google also show you the link coming from your older post. Whenever you delete a post from Google produce 404 error in the website because you just delete the post, not its URL from the web. You can delete Your post URL by adding that URL in the Removal Tool of the google. Which is under Google webmaster>>Google index>>Removal URLs
Note:- Remember that each link pointing to a page is a vote for it whether the link is from within the site or an external one. Internal link building is one of the easiest search engine optimization things you can do yourself and have total control over.
Best Practices For Internal linking Optimization
Although I have described most of the best practices of Internal linking Optimization above, for list lovers here is a summary,
- Add internal links when it is useful or necessary for the user experience.
- Try not to use more than 10-15 internal links per page (within the body text). This is not a rule or a guideline but it’s just my own recommendation.
- Use the Nofollow tag carefully.
- Make sure that you don’t have any broken internal links within your website, this is bad for SEO.
- Make a link to those pages which is related to each other.
- Make sure that the pages you want to rank higher in search engines have the greater number of internal links.
- You can use the ‘Internal links’ report under the section ‘Traffic’ in Google webmaster tools to find out the status of your internal link building.
- Make sure that the total number of links per page (internal and external) is no more than a 100
- Link to an older page to reactivate that page.
- Place all the link of a page in Sitemap so that google bot can access all the page.
Once you are finished with Internal linking Optimization. Now try to focus on, how to write SEO optimized content in WordPress and its basic feature.
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If you have any suggestion or problem about Internal linking Optimization please feel free to comment below.
