We should all know the importance of Google search by now. You want your customers to be able to find you when they search and to find you before they find the competition. Internal Links for SEO is about referencing your own content WordPress XML sitemaps are one way to help with this.
What is SEO
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is how we refer to the things we do on our website to help Google and our customers find it. There are many actions you can take to improve your search ranking. This article about internal links for SEO is the second in a series of articles on actions you can take to rank higher in Google search results.
What are Internal Links for SEO
Internal links for SEO are hyperlinks that point to pages on your own website. These are different than external links, which link out to pages on other domains.
When Google crawls your website to index your content they scan part of your site but not the whole thing. Good WordPress XML sitemaps will help Google crawl more efficiently. Linking to your own content is also a good way to help Google discover other content because Google visits and crawls the links on the pages they crawl.
There are basically four types of internal links for SEO: navigation, footer, context, and sidebar links.
Navigation links are your menu links, they make up your sites structure. Footer links appear on most pages on your website at the bottom of the page and should help users find important pages on your site like the contact page or an FAQ. Sidebar links are meant to help users find similar or related content on your site.
Contextual links are links that appear in the content on your site. The links are often placed within descriptive anchor text (you can see examples on this page! It links to our SEO services page as well as other posts in this series.).
Tips on How to Tackle Internal Links for SEO
Resource: The SEMrush blog has a great in-depth article on building internal links.
The basics of internal link building come down to finding your pillar pages, building topic clusters, and supporting your site’s new pages.
Pillar pages are the pages that speak broadly to a key topic. On this website our pillar pages are our service pages. The content on this website stems from our services. The pillar pages are the top-level pages for each of those services.
As we post about these topics and provide details or more specific content that links to and from the pillar pages we create topic clusters. This post links to our SEO services page and provides an in-depth perspective on SEO.
When you create a new page, ensure all relevant pages link to it and that it links to other relevant pages. You can use Google search to find internal linking opportunities on your site. Simply choose a topic and tell Google to only search your site.
Example: Go to Google and search this -> site:boom12.ca SEO
Use the results to build links within your own site to “cluster” posts and pages on a single topic.
We do SEO for Halifax Small Businesses
The easiest way for you to get a WordPress XML Sitemap for your website is to give us a call. We offer SEO services custom-built for Halifax small businesses. You can contact us or book a free, no obligation SEO discovery call.
