The Art of Internal Linking | On-Page SEO for the Defense Industry
It can be incredibly difficult to rank a single page by itself for a handful of keywords – especially if there’s any competition at all, especially the difficulty in the Defense Contractor space.
However, if you have three or four pages that all rank well and they all link back to the single ranking page – voila!
The right kind of user engagement via internal links can effectively boost your ranking power tenfold, which makes creating relevant content to anchor these links very important.
Linking to relevant content increases the likelihood that the reader will stick around longer and check out what else you have to offer.
1) How important are internal links?
Very. A single page on your site may not rank very well by itself, but once you start linking to it from other pages on your site (either through anchor text or through images), search engines will see those links as votes for that page and raise its ranking in relation to those keywords.
2) Why you should do them
There are a number of factors that come into play when it comes to ranking a single page.
However, a majority of them fall under user engagement and relevancy.
If you have internal links leading to your home page or other high-ranking pages on your site, users will be much more likely to engage with those pages – and Google notices that sort of thing very quickly, especially Schema Markup.
3) Where to put them
One of Google’s ranking factors is user engagement. Essentially, they want to show users links that will be useful to them in some way.
As an SEO link builder, your job is to make sure you place your internal links in relevant places around your site.
A link from a page about pet care to a page about puppies would not be very effective for user engagement – but a link from a page about dog training to one on how to train puppies would be incredibly effective.
After all, both are relevant topics but are treated very differently!
The same goes for external links – if you’re linking another website in an effort to improve your own rankings or drive traffic elsewhere, that isn’t very helpful for user engagement either.
4) When to link
When you create a new piece of content, you need to decide whether it’s worthy enough to link to another page on your site.
Just because you can link away doesn’t mean that you should.
That being said, when it comes time to decide which pages are worthy for linking – or what keywords are worth targeting with your next piece of content – remember that relevance is key.
Relevance in text, relevance in user engagement…that’s what search engines will reward.