External links and back links carry huge weight in the SEO and ranking worlds because they are seen as a vote of confidence from someone else’s site to yours. Essentially someone else (apart from you) is saying how good you are. But what about internal links? Isn’t that just you saying how great you are?
Internal links are either navigational or contextual. Navigational links are used in headers, footers, sidebars to move users around the site. Contextual links are used within the body of a piece of text and link the user to other related or interesting content. For example, a home page on a microbrewery website might mention casks with an internal link to a blog about different types of cask. These links are an excellent way to point users to extra value content within your own site.
Strip back the layout, content, fonts and colours of a website and what are you left with? The structure. This forms the backbone of any website and without a good structure, it will be pretty difficult to keep visitors. Internal sitelinks are a key component to the structure of your site. You can spot those sites with good sitelinks – put a company name into your search bar and you may see the site’s main page and then several internal links listed below. Users can easily click directly on to the page they want and this increases a site’s navigability, brand reputation and user’s trust. In short, sitelinks are a huge SEO advantage.
Link share – or link equity or link juice – enables all pages on a website to be found by crawlers and indexed on search engines. A homepage with links to two out of five pages on your site will result in only those two being found and indexed. You will increase visibility of all pages if they are linked, but make sure the links are genuine and make sense. Be careful of using nofollow links – while they are internal links, they are likely to do more harm than good. And quantity does not equal quality! External links carry more weight because an independent site is recognising your worth, but internal links can make a difference too and shouldn’t be ignored.
To find out how effective your internal links are, or to check how many you have – if any at all – please give Target Ink a call on 01892800400 or take a look at https://www.targetink.co.uk/ See how many internal links you can spot on our site!
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