Both humans and search engines need to be able to navigate your website easily. Internal links play a big part in how navigable your website is, as they build paths between pages and allow visitors (of both the human and Google spider kind) to find the information they need. Furthermore, the faster they can access relevant content, the higher your site will rank in the search results.

Link-building for humans

Visitors can enter a website anywhere (not just the home page). Whether it’s a blog post, one of your service pages or the About page, there should be links from these pages to lead visitors to the type of information they will be looking for. So, for example, a link from a page about one of your services might contain links to pricing packages for the service, testimonials about the service, a blog post about something related to the service etc. Some of these pages will no doubt be hidden from the main navigation menu. Without relevant links, visitors will leave your site and possibly go and seek the information they need on your competitor’s site.

Link-building for bots

Spiders or bots use internal links to find and index content, adding it to their database to enable them to match search queries with relevant content. A page without a link is the end of the chain for a search engine. It won’t look any further on your site for content matching a specific search query, and will look elsewhere instead. So, the easier you can make a search engine’s job, the more likely it is that your pages will be ranked for a particular topic.

Your link-building strategy

There are many aspects to consider when building links. These include linking individual blog posts to relevant pages on your site, creating links from relevant anchor text, linking any ‘orphan’ pages to at least one other page on your site and using a standard colour for links.

Bear in mind that link-building alone won’t have a dramatic overnight effect on your search engine ranking, but it certainly helps. Consider enabling Schema (structured data) to your site, which is another way you can help search engines index your site and is now part of the Google ranking factors algorithm. For a full website structure and link review, or for help implementing Schema, contact us here.