Are you using in-copy links to improve your website?

A very easy way to improve your website quickly is to ensure that you include links to other pages on your website within the copy on your site. In other words, don’t just rely on your main navigation to help people find their way to content on your site - link to it whenever you refer to it within the text on your site.

This is an aspect that is often overlooked because we are used to writing copy for print, and not for web, and we all write the content for our websites in word processing packages. One of the wonderful things about the web is that you can add hyperlinks throughout your copy to loads of other content, which is why people don’t read websites in the way that they read books: they tend to jump around a lot more, and move from one website to another, rather than reading from page 1, chapter 1 all the way to the end.

If you have thought about your website’s links, you’ve probably thought about them in terms of making sure that external websites link back to yours, rather than thinking about your own website’s internal linking structure. While links from other external websites are important, it’s not an area that you can control in the way that you can with your own site’s internal links.

Spending some time looking at this area of your site, adding in-copy links, and improving the linking structure of your site will help with two things: how easy it is for how web users find information on your site and navigate their way around; and how your site performs in search engines.

Why does the internal linking structure of your site improve your site’s search engine performance? Well search engines look at many factors, including how well a site is structured when they are trying to determine the authority of a page for a particular search term.

Think of it like this. The search engine looks at a page on your website that’s titled ‘Everything you need to know about search engine optimisation’. The fact that it’s called this suggests that it’s something to do with ‘search engine optimisation’. However the search engine also notices that lots of other sites and pages across the web are also linking to this page. That suggests that the page has something interesting on it, which is why other pages and sites are linking to it. Now, the search engine will look at the words that these other pages and sites are using to link to this page ‘Everything you need to know about search engine optimisation’. The words within the hyperlink are known as ‘anchor text’. Interestingly enough, many of these links use words such as ‘search engine optimisation’ in the text they use to link to the page, which gives the search engines another clue that this page has something really very useful on it about search engine optimisation.

So, when search engines are trying to assess the value of the information on your site related to a particular topic (or search term) they will look at internal links just as much as links from external sites. Internal links give just as much value as external links, and you have complete control over them. So making sure that you have lots of internal links, and really good anchor text, is a key way of improving overall search engine performance.

Below is an example of an effective website linking structure:

internal linking example

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your internal link strategy
So how do you make sure that you focus your energies where they will have most effect? Almost every website has content, and this content is key to your success with internal linking. By using internal anchor links you will be able to pass link value to pages at a deeper level on your website. In order to achieve this, you must review each part of your site, section by section and identify key areas of the website that you want to perform better.

Within every website there are pages (usually top level pages) that receive a high number of links back to them. You can identify which pages are doing well for links by using Google Webmaster Tools (a free tool from Google that allows you see the back end workings for your website). You can then strengthen the weaker pages by pointing anchor links from the high value pages to the lower value pages on your site.

Once you have identified the key areas that you want to perform better, you then need to define keywords that are associated with these areas. These keywords will then become your anchor text. So, if you want to perform better for the search term ‘widget A’ then you should make sure that you have a page on your website about ‘Widget A’ and that you link to that page using anchor text that includes the keyword ‘Widget A’. The example below is from the tictocfamily website: in this article a keyword we are looking to promote is ‘search engine optimisation’. Therefore we have used the keywords ‘search engine optimisation’ in the anchor text, and linked it to our page dedicated to search engine optimisation.

internal linking example

In this instance we have used the exact phrase ‘search engine optimisation’, but this doesn’t need to be the case. It is best practice to vary the keywords used, as long as they are related to the page they are linking to. For example, we could also use ‘SEO’ or ‘search marketing’ or ‘search engine performance’ as keywords in the anchor text.

Content
When you are writing your website your content, you should be thinking about how you can relate the content to other pages on your website, particularly those pages at a deeper level. They key thing to remember is you want to create interest in all pages on your website not just the top level pages that make up your primary navigation structure.

Summary
In almost every situation internal linking will add value to your website and improve the overall search engine performance of deeper level pages. Anchor links are part of an overall search engine optimisiation strategy that will be effective for those longer tail keywords (deeper level product- or service-specific keywords) rather than generic keywords. If you spend some time getting your internal linking structure right you’ll not only improve your site’s performance in search engines, but also provide a better web experience for your website users, making the online experience more positive for them.

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