The link structure of a website is very important for SEO. Having a good link architecture will make the indexation and the crawling of your website much easier. Your web pages weight distribution will improve as well. Building good internal links will give your users a better navigation of your website. I will be covering with you a few important tips to improve your internal linking.
Anchor Text of Internal Links
Adding anchor texts to your internal links as keywords can improve the rankings of your internal pages for those keywords. Using combinations and variations of the same keyword or key phrase can help you achieve better results for a bigger range of keywords. By using variations of keywords, you increase your chances of getting found for long tail keywords and also it decreases your chances of stuffing your keywords. Keep in mind that you should always look natural, don’t overdo it. Put a decent amount of keywords in your anchor texts because overdoing it or stuffing your keywords won’t help your rankings.
Broken Links & Duplicate Content
Make sure to check your website for any broken links or dangling links. A lot of link juice is lost through broken links. You could improve your internal link structure by removing any broken links, dangling links, and duplicate content. By doing so, you could also increase your total number of pages indexed, improve your website’s indexation time and crawlability and eventually, your rankings. If you would like to detect any broken links in your website, use the Link Checker Tool. Simply write your URL and it will show every internal link you have in your website and it will point out which ones are broken.
Text Menus
Website’s that use text menus have tendency to get higher rankings than ones who don’t. The reason for that is that you encounter less indexation problems than using Flash or Javascript menus. Over the years, search engines got smarter but they still have problems reading and crawling images and flash content. Text menus are the most SEO friendly kind of menu to use. They also increase your chances of getting accurate sitelinks for your website.
Outgoing Links
You shouldn’t have to many external links because you lose some of your page weight through them. Keep a reasonable number of outgoing links, 20 external links per web page should be the most and that is already a lot. This will help search engines focus on the more important pages of your website and flow more link juice to them. If you have t0o many outgoing links, you drive most of your website’s link juice to other websites. This means that your internal pages get less importance/weight from the search engines. This might decrease your chances of getting high ranked. For those reasons, you should keep your number of external links as low as possible.
NoFollow Links
Google changed their way of handling the “rel=nofollow” attribute. It doesn’t give the same amount of link juice a “follow” attribute would give. Using this attribute might make you lose some of your website’s weight because “nofollow” links do not let the link juice pass since it specifically tells the crawler to stay on the current page and not follow that link. If you have a blog on your website, I strongly recommend you to add the “rel=nofollow” attribute to your comments.
Link Placement
We all know that order has weight. Placing your main keywords first in your title tag will give them more weight. It is the same concept over here. Placing your links in the header of your web pages will give them more weight. Placing them at the footer of your web pages will flow less link juice than the ones that are placed at the top of the page. It is highly recommended to put the most important links of your website on the top of the page rather than in the footer like for example website navigation.
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