In the world of SEO, there's always a heavy focus on developing inbound links from third party sites. This is good, but what marketers often forget is that internal links within a website can also help search engine rankings. In a recent article, MarketingSherpa spoke with Eric Ward, one of the search industry’s top linking experts, about how to use internal links to improve SEO.
Some key points:
Establish benchmarks for testing: First and foremost, Ward stresses the importance of developing traffic baselines showing, for example, the amount of traffic coming to various pages on your website that you deem important. The baseline numbers will help you measure the impact of changes you may later wish to make.
Tweak anchor text: The hyperlinked text of a link -- its anchor text -- helps signal to search engines what type of content is on the destination page. Using your target keywords in the anchor text of on-site links can boost the destination pages’ performance in searches for those keywords. In particular, focus on the anchor text being used on your homepage to direct visitors to important internal pages.
Boost traffic to lagging pages: you may find there are pages on your website that you want visitors to browse, but which are lagging in performance. Internal links from more popular pages on your website can help boost traffic on lagging content that is nevertheless important to you from a marketing standpoint.
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