When it comes to improving the SEO and user experience of your site, internal links play a crucial role. Unfortunately, many website owners fail to leverage the full potential of their internal links, which ultimately affect the usability and ranking of the sites. Developing a robust internal linking strategy is a time-consuming task and requires great SEO expertise. And that’s exactly where the importance of hiring a reputable link building agency in Sydney comes into the picture.
You can expect such an agency to implement several SEO tactics that will eventually boost your site’s performance and visibility. Even if you don’t implement these strategies yourself, it’s always good to understand what aspects are being taken care of by your chosen link building agency. Let’s try to understand the true value of internal links and the strategies the agency will most likely implement to make them more effective.
What are internal links?
Internal links refer to the hyperlinks that connect different pages of your website. Though many webmasters sometimes don’t consider the effectiveness of internal links in the first place, when optimising their sites, in reality, they’re extremely useful for SEO.
These links let search engine crawlers find out more of your web pages. They also help your site visitors navigate around it conveniently. From a user’s viewpoint, it could be anything – from learning more about your business to purchasing one of your products/services. Let’s take a quick look at the key benefits of internal links that you can expect to enjoy by hiring a top-tier link building agency.
- They expedite the indexing process of your web pages by making it more convenient for search engine crawlers to discover your whole site.
- They greatly improve your site’s user experience, which helps your visitors stay longer on your site; search engines receive a quality signal from it.
- When internal links are appropriately included in the content, they might prove to be valuable for rankings.
- If you can use meaningful anchor text in your internal links, the SEO value of your site will most likely improve.
So, basically, if you can logically organise your site with links to relevant pages, it might lead to better customer conversion and improved search engine rankings!
Key strategies that make internal links more effective:
Here are the strategies that a leading link building agency Sydney will typically implement to make the most out of your internal links. Of course, the exact strategies will depend on your objectives and your site but the following ones are considered to be best practices.
Determining the right structure: First of all, your chosen link building agency will work on establishing a perfect structure for your site. In order to develop an effective internal linking structure, your site has to be organised into categories and subcategories. By maintaining a logical structure, you’ll help search engines to understand the way your pages are linked together, and therefore, the pages will be correctly ranked for certain terms. It should never be very difficult to find a particular page on your site.
For this reason, the agency will possibly try to ensure that none of the pages on your site would be over three clicks away. If you tend to add pages to the site regularly, the link building agency should also offer recommendations on where new pieces of content need to be placed to develop internal links that will help both the search engines and your site visitors.
Making links visible: Many site owners think that internal links may jumble their site and distract the visitors and thus, they make the links smaller. However, the reality is, if your site visitors cannot find or see a link, how would they click on it? Therefore, you can expect the agency to correct this by creating distinguishable and easily visible links. Additionally, it would probably also avoid using “nofollow” tags for your internal links as they don’t pass any SEO value.
Adding context to internal links: This is one of the crucial aspects where the right link building agency can help you outperform the competition. You’ve surely seen this many times: when site owners do interlinking, they simply add a link to one of the relevant pages, without adding any context.
Search engines might ignore these links considering they are only linking some existing content. But when a context is added around a link, it helps to draw the visitor’s attention. This gives relevant signals to search engines by passing more SEO value than only adding a simple link.
Linking together old posts and new posts: Fresh pieces of content are seen as a positive ranking factor by search engines and hence, links from new content to old content pass fresh SEO value. Therefore, your chosen link building agency will most likely review your entire site thoroughly first and then add links from old content to related, newer content and vice versa.
Adding contextual links: If your site has various posts revolving around a specific topic, the agency will most likely link them together. This strategy helps both your site visitors and search engines understand that those posts are topically related. It will also help search engines identify which of those posts is the most complete one. The practice of linking the main post with other relevant posts will let the search engines understand that the main post is the most complete piece. Therefore, they will rank it above other relevant posts.
Making internal links actually work: This is another key reason behind hiring a reputable link building agency. As already mentioned, one of the key objectives of internal links is to improve user engagement. You could add several links to increase your site’s SEO value but if those links don’t improve its engagement quotient, are they actually adding any value? This is where the placement of your internal links plays a crucial role.
For instance, if you place the internal links at the bottom of a page, probably very few people will click on them. But if you could put them at the top of a relevant page, a lot of people will be going to click on them. So, those links will pass more value than links that are placed in a widget or at the bottom of a page. While this is a complicated thing to figure out, professional link building experts should be able to help you out.
Eliminating low-value links: If your site has several internal links on each of its pages, the SEO value passed through them gets lowered. The link building agency you’ve hired will take care of it by removing low-value links. Your site visitors won’t click on the links that aren’t relevant and not engaging. So, there’s no point in keeping them on your web pages.
Closing thoughts
In addition to the above, your chosen link building agency in Sydney will likely try to add navigational links, link hierarchical pages and so on by analysing your existing internal link structure. Remember that you don’t need to have lots of internal links on each of the pages.
The most effective interlinking should occur naturally and it will automatically become helpful to the search engines and your site visitors. This will eventually result in higher user engagement and better search engine rankings!