If you want to increase the time your audience spends on your website, interlink your web pages.
Interlinking guides readers to relevant content on your website, keeping them for a long time, which improves brand authority.
It also enables search engines to understand the search queries for which to relate and rank your website, which increases traffic. And an increase in traffic increases the chances of making sales.
However, to get positive results, you should know the resources to interlink. Interlinking irrelevant web pages increases bounce rates, and that lowers a website`s rank.
In this article, you`ll learn how to apply internal linking to your site, improve your rank, and make more sales.
Build an Organized Website Structure
Organizing your website into categories and subcategories makes it easy to create a hierarchy that helps search engines easily crawl and human users navigate.
That`s because an organized site structure makes it easy for people to see and understand each page`s focus.
Website structure involves putting the important pages at the top of your website. These pages may include home, blog, about, services, and contact pages.
.png "Building an organized website structure")
Privacy policy and terms of service pages can be on the footer because they are not readers` priorities. Readers want to know whether what you offer can help them before they seek to know your policies and terms of service.
For example, if you are a social media manager, you can categorize your website according to social media platforms, and put Facebook content separate from Twitter content, etc.
That makes it easy for users to see and move to their preferred category.
A good website hierarchy also helps search engines understand your website context and rank it on the relevant search queries.
Check Your Site`s Orphan Pages and Interlink Them
Orphan pages are the ones that are not linked to any other page on your website. To enhance indexing and easy navigation, ensure to interlink them to others.
That means you should concentrate not only on interlinking blog posts but all pages on your website. That makes it easy for people to find any page they want despite the page they land on.
However, ensure the pages you interlink are related. For example, if you are collecting email addresses to build an email list, you can link your landing page with your terms of service and policy pages. That enables people to read and know how you use the information you collect and if it is safe for them to give their emails.
Linking irrelevant text or pages is unprofessional and can make readers avoid your website, which tarnishes a brand image and makes you lose clients.
To find orphan pages easily, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog.
To use this tool, you only need to sign up for an account and paste your website URL and it will reveal all orphan pages.
Link to Quality Pages
A page that has no traffic can`t drive traffic to other pages. To drive readers through your web pages, interlink them with quality pages. Such pages are old pages and have good traffic.
High traffic volume indicates that pages are helpful and can make it easy to convince people to read other pages, too.
Use Relevant Descriptive Anchor Text
Anchor text is the hyperlinked text in blog content. It should align with the content interlinked. Do not force a link into a phrase and make your content sound awkward.
Moreover, make your anchor text as descriptive as possible to let people understand and relate it with their intent.
An example is when you are writing content about how to become a freelancer and want to link it to freelance writing jobs content. The best text to hyperlink would be, “Here are websites where you can find freelance writing jobs,” and not “Do you want to make money online?”
Besides, do not hyperlink identical phrases on various pages on your website. That`s a black hat SEO method that can lower your website rank. Each hyperlink should be different among web pages despite their relation.
Link Pages with High-Quality Backlinks
High-quality backlinks are links from third-party websites that have high traffic, which increases the potential to direct traffic to the page you linked to.
Interlinking such a page to other pages boosts the chances of spreading the traffic on your website and increasing its rank.
But how do you understand which pages have high-quality backlinks? Use backlink checker tools such as
Choose your preferred tool, create an account, and paste your website URL. It will reveal all your website backlinks and their monthly traffic. That will help you know which pages to target.
Audit Your Website Links
Your existing internal links can be the reason to drop your website rank. Some links may be broken or unindexable.
That can hinder people from navigating through your website and search engines from indexing and ranking your content.
Auditing your site enables you to know what`s hindering your site rank and how to make it more indexable and reader-friendly.
To get accurate audit results, use website audit tools such as
All you need to do is to register for an account and choose your plan. Then paste the website page URLs and the tool will give you quick results.
Here are some of the issues these tools can find:
Pages Crawl Depth
 |
| Image source: WordStream |
Page crawl depth refers to the number of links search engine bots crawl to reach and index a page in a single crawl.
Creating many web pages on a single category makes it difficult for search engines to crawl and index your website.
An example is when you are selling laptops and then you create one page and make subcategories for all of the models you sell. That will result in a long page depth. Instead, create a different page for each model and you`ll make your website navigable and easy to index.
However, ensure to prioritize your important pages and keep them near the home page so they can be easy to reach.
Internal Links Quality and Quantity
Using tools enables getting the number of pages receiving internal links and orphan pages and knowing the quality and quantity of the internal links on each page.
That makes it easy for you to focus on the pages to increase or reduce links.
That`s because a few links on web pages reduce the chances of driving traffic to a site. Meanwhile, too many links make a web page look spammy and can make people avoid it, which reduces traffic and rank.
Five internal links are the optimum number of internal links you should focus on in a 1000-word article.
Pages with the Highest Link-Rank
Website audit tools help in knowing the internal-linked pages that rank the most, which helps to identify the authoritative pages on your website.
These tools give insights into your web page's link structure so you can strengthen your internal linking strategy.
Broken Internal Links
Broken links happen when the content to which the link directs gets removed. This makes users be directed to a non-existing page, resulting in 404 errors.
To fix this problem, remove the broken link or replace it with another one directing to existing content, and audit tools will show you this as well.
Links That Can`t Be Crawled
When a link contains unnecessary characters, or it`s misspelled, it can`t be crawled.
Unsafe URL characters include <>, {}, [], \, %, ^, and |.
These tools will identify links that aren`t crawled and suggest how you should fix them.
In this case, you will need to correct them for any misspellings or unsafe characters and they`ll be indexable.
No-Follow Attributes in Internal Links
No follow links also called the rel=“nofollow” links on webpages block search engine bots from crawling the links. This is done by putting your webpage links in robots.XHTML files and setting no-index or password to protect the page from indexing.
To solve this problem, remove the no-index pages from the robots.XHTML files.
Redirect Chains
Redirect chains happen when there is a chain of links directing to the main destination link. So, one link directs to other links, which then direct to the destination link.
Too many of these links slow down a site's speed, create a poor user experience, and make it hard for search engines to crawl your site.
To fix this problem, remove the chain and leave only one link so users can quickly get to the destination resource. Do not make a more-than-three-link redirect chain.
Improve Your Website Dwell Time with Internal Linking
Creating great content and not interlinking it makes it unnavigable lowers your website rank and reduces traffic.
If you interlink pages it`s easy for the search engines to understand their relationship and rank them on the relevant queries.
It also makes a website user-friendly since people can follow the links and easily find other content within your site. This increases the time readers spend on your site and generates more conversions.
Work on your site`s internal linking strategy and you will improve your website rank and drive sales.
0 Comments