Internal Linking Optimization Services

What is Internal Linking Optimization?

Internal Linking Optimization focuses on optimizing the way your pages are linked together to ensure search engines can discover them. It consists of analyzing the quality of your current internal links, examining your navigational structure, and ensuring your internal links are visible to search engine bots.

Internal linking entails all links between various pages on the same website. It includes your navigational links, e.g., menu, footer, breadcrumbs, or sidebar, but also the contextual links within your content. Optimizing these elements is crucial to provide a good user experience on your website and ensure search engines can find all your pages by crawling your website.

[…] internal linking is supercritical for SEO. I think it’s one of the biggest things you can do on a website to guide Google and guide visitors to the pages you think are important.

source:

Why is internal linking important?

Search engines discover pages by following links. This means that if your content is not linked correctly, search engines might never discover it. Consequently, it can’t be crawled or indexed. In other words, all the effort you put in optimizing your content might be ineffective if you first don’t optimize your internal linking to ensure search engines can discover your pages. 

Internal linking not only allows search engines to discover new pages but also helps them assess their importance and understand the connections between your pages. That’s why a well-optimized internal linking structure shows search engines which content matters to you the most and increases its chances of being crawled and indexed. 

Internal linking also matters from the users’ perspective. Well-optimized navigational links help users browse through your site easily and find what they need intuitively. Additionally, well-placed contextual links keep them engaged with your content and allow them to discover more pages and stay longer on your site.

Who can benefit from internal linking services?

We especially recommend internal linking services if you own a large website or your content is dynamically changing. The complexity of bigger and dynamic websites makes internal linking more challenging to analyze, and the possibility of making a mistake increases. In this case, an experienced SEO professional and SEO tools are necessary to thoroughly examine your site and ensure there aren’t any critical issues that can keep your pages out of the search engines’ index.

Internal linking services are recommended whenever you create a new site or plan to migrate your current one to a new domain. Our services will allow you to build a solid foundation to grow your business and avoid issues that can occur when redirecting your pages to a new domain.

However, no matter the size or type of website, your internal linking can greatly affect how search engines discover and, consequently, index your pages. A consultation with an SEO specialist will help you ensure search engines can find your valuable pages and find ways to improve your organic traffic further. 

What we offer

Analysis of your navigational structure

Navigation is one of the most important parts of your website. It allows users to quickly find what they are looking for and show search engines which pages matter the most.

We analyze elements like menus, sidebars, and footers to ensure your navigation is intuitive and that you include links to all your valuable pages. Our SEO experts also analyze the implementation of your breadcrumbs or recommend how to implement them from scratch in case you don’t have them on your website.

Orphan pages identification

Orphan pages don’t have any internal links pointing to them. Search engines can still discover these pages if they are linked from your sitemap. These pages are often not indexed, and they can waste your crawl budget and keep search engines away from your more valuable pages.

To address this issue, we will identify all orphan pages on your site and prepare recommendations on what should be done to fix them.

Analysis of the quality of your links

The way your pages are linked together is not the only thing that matters in SEO. The quality of each link can also affect how search engines and users see your website.

During our internal linking optimization, we will identify any issues that can decrease the quality of your links, including internal redirects and broken links. You will receive a list of links that need your attention, along with our recommendations on what should be done to improve the quality.

Ensuring your links are visible to search engines

Search engine bots don’t behave like human users. They can’t click buttons or scroll through your website. Because of these limitations, some of the techniques used by developers make links invisible to search engine bots.

We will check how internal links are implemented on your site. We analyze if they are any JavaScript mechanisms that prevent search engine bots from successfully navigating your pages. The analysis also includes examining the pagination on your website to ensure search engines can reach content on your paginated pages.

Analysis of your link HTML tags

In HTML, you can define your relationship with the links by setting up the value of rel attribute to nofollow, UGC, or sponsored. These values tell search engines that you don’t want to be associated with certain websites that may be linked from your site. They’re beneficial in, e.g., forum or comment sections where users generate the content or when you have sponsored links on your website.

We evaluate your link HTML tags to ensure that you didn’t set the value of rel attribute to nofollow, UGC, or sponsored to your valuable pages by mistake. We can also recommend adding the attribute to certain links if we see it would be beneficial.