How important are internal links?
- Thread starter ChrisBa
- Start date
elcidofaguy
Active Member
Internal links are extremely important for 3 reasons:
1) User navigation which also supports increased interaction and lower bounce rates... As it helps users find/access information which they are seeking...
2) Ability for search engines to crawl, understand and index your site.
3) For you to leverage link juice from one page to another i.e. use of silos to promote a single page for a given keyword. Through link juice sculpting you can increase the importance of a page which in turn will contribute to improved rankings (together with backlinks) and other factors.
1) User navigation which also supports increased interaction and lower bounce rates... As it helps users find/access information which they are seeking...
2) Ability for search engines to crawl, understand and index your site.
3) For you to leverage link juice from one page to another i.e. use of silos to promote a single page for a given keyword. Through link juice sculpting you can increase the importance of a page which in turn will contribute to improved rankings (together with backlinks) and other factors.
PTTed
Active Member
Yes just as @elcidofaguy said, by creating internal links from one page on your website to another, you conserve more PageRank within your own website. And then if you use keyword rich anchor text on your links (especially contextually embedded links) from inside your own website, you can boost your pages' rankings.
A great example of a website that does a lot of this is Wikipedia. That is why many Wikipedia pages were so hard to outrank for so long for certain keywords.
A great example of a website that does a lot of this is Wikipedia. That is why many Wikipedia pages were so hard to outrank for so long for certain keywords.
elcidofaguy
Active Member
Hahaha I was deliberately trying to avoid using the word page rank given it has not been updated for more than two years to the public and further is likely never to be updated again... That's not to say that PR is dead - its still part of G's algo but as iterated its no longer updated to the public... Hence when evaluating the authority of a website/page you will need to rely on a combination of factors such as third party metrics i.e. DA/PA/CF/TF as well as assessing the quality of sites providing backlinks etc....
On my part I've tried to stop using the term "PR" ... My personal preference is to use the term "Trust Rank" as a replacement which refers to the mythical true metric which G has never released to the public... But that's another story ;-)
PTTed
Active Member
Good stuff Sid.
In some ways it sucks that Google isn't updating PageRank anymore. I find these other metric measurements and tools by all of the various places out there to be much less useful to me than it used to be to simply look at how much PageRank a page had and then apply my understanding of how it gets distributed through whatever links are on the page. I think a lot of SEO guys out there were able to do the same thing and thus it gives Google more reasons to never update it again.
In my model of how Google works, there is no doubt (in my mind) they are still using PageRank as their primary weighting measure for links. In my mind, the whole Trust Rank thing is simply another modifier for PageRank and how much weight a link should have if it should have any at all.
PageRank has come along way though. Through my own testing I have determined that they have altered the weighting of which blocks of content pass more PageRank as well as (definitively proven) that they drastically shifted the way that PageRank is distributed among the links within a block of content (as compared to the original PageRank formula that everyone reads about on Wikipedia and most other informational sources about it.
And Google has gotten much better at assigning link reputation than it used to. It is really impressive how good of a job they do. But anyway........
Rahul Sharma
Member
The search engines don’t rank websites as a whole in the SERPs – they rank individual pages. For most websites, the homepage is going to get most of the traffic and inbound links, but that doesn’t mean that deeper internal pages can’t also be useful from an SEO standpoint. However, in order for those internal pages to effectively compete in the search results they need their own (albeit smaller) link portfolio and search engine trust.
That’s where internal linking comes into play – but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. You don’t need to have every link on every page of your site. Here are some strategies that will help you understand why internal linking is important, and also the right way to go about doing it:
That’s where internal linking comes into play – but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. You don’t need to have every link on every page of your site. Here are some strategies that will help you understand why internal linking is important, and also the right way to go about doing it:
Muzzamil
Active Member
Keywords are mostly used to get more more visitors because we choose keywords that are getting high searches but have less competition. This way we can easily be on the first page of google because there is less competition, and we can get a lot of clicks/visitors because there are a lot of people searching for that keyword. So keywords don't really have to do anything to do with internal links unless you have got articles on certain keywords where you would like to send people. But it is good to have other internal links anyway so people can look at your other stuff and get to know you more about you.
KeralMTG
Active Member
So how do we know which keywords are high searches and low competition?
Muzzamil
Active Member
I use google keyword planner which is free but you can use other paid methods which tell you in details like how many exactly people are searching for a certain keyword or how many people you are competing against. Google keyword planner does the same thing but it doesn't give you details on what exact keywords should you use. One paid service that offers keywords in details is semrush. If you just google "semrush", you will find out the official website of the semrush. Good Luck!
KeralMTG
Active Member
They just changed the keyword planner in Google so now it doesn't give exact numbers. They made a change in the last week or two. People are saying if you are paying for Adwords advertising then it shows the exact searches like before.
Muzzamil
Active Member
Sorry I just checked it right now and you are right, they are now making people pay for advertising to get access to keyword planner. I don't why they did that but I guess now I will have to pay some other service because I am not considering to buy google advertising at this moment. Again I am sorry for misinformation, I should have checked before. Also many times if I want to check how much competition my keyword has, I put my keywords within quotes in google search bar and it gives me exactly how much competition my keyword has. So for example if my keyword is -how to make money online- then I would put it in google search bar with quotes like this: "how to make money online". Then google will show me the number of results at the top of the page and that number of results tell us how much competition our keyword has. I have been using this technique way before I found out about google keyword planner which we can't use now for free.
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Dean
Well-Known Member
Internal links on your site are very important and they should not be taken lightly.
There are many reasons for this but a few of the more important are to help reduce bounce rate because people will see these links and quite possibly go to another page on your site that they might not have gone to.
Another reason is to help pass link juice from one page or post on your site to another thus helping it's SEO.
One of the best reasons is that Google and the other search engines like a website to have internal links and haing them can help your ranking.
There are other good reasons but these are some of the top reasons to have internal links around your website.
Cheers, Dean.
There are many reasons for this but a few of the more important are to help reduce bounce rate because people will see these links and quite possibly go to another page on your site that they might not have gone to.
Another reason is to help pass link juice from one page or post on your site to another thus helping it's SEO.
One of the best reasons is that Google and the other search engines like a website to have internal links and haing them can help your ranking.
There are other good reasons but these are some of the top reasons to have internal links around your website.
Cheers, Dean.