Semalt: Reasons Why Having A Good Internal Structure Improves Your Overall SEO

Internal links are one of the most useful practices in getting visitors to stay on your website. They come with several other benefits for SEO, like helping you index other pages that Google is yet to discover. It also improves your link flow and a lot more advantages you will find here, in our blog.

In this article, we will discuss the best practices we implement that helps improve the user experience on your pages. 

One amazing fact about internal link building is that most times, the business or website owner is actively involved in the linking process. Internal link structure is difficult to handle alone, so SEO pros invite content writers, UX experts, IT managers, and other teams around Semalt, including your website's stakeholders, to give their opinion at every stage of development. 

Internal linking has a big impact on your SEO performance as a whole and can influence a range of other SEO factors.

Here are the best practices we use to ensure your website performs better in SEO. 

One of the most significant reasons why internal linking is so important is that it makes your website good for visitors. On a webpage, there could be several elements that fall below SEO standard practices. Things like thin content, too many ads above the fold, disruptive interstitials can all cost you, visitors. These things are some of the main reasons why a website experiences high bounce-back rates. 

Search engines place a high value on your user experience as they care about the patronage of their end-users. If a searcher uses a search engine and finds exactly what they are looking for at the top of the SERP, the user considers that search engine to be good and will most likely visit again. 

With billions of data points on how different users can interact with the search results and websites, these search engines have developed algorithms that evaluate the user experience, and their ability to read this metric on a website is only going to grow. As machine learning, automated algorithm updates, and core web updates have been introduced, there is great emphasis on ensuring a website is as user-friendly as possible. 

Having valuable content on your site naturally leads your customers through the customer journey and enables them to complete the sales journey. With a proper linking structure, your visitors will be able to bounce from one content to another as they move through the funnel. In the end, you've created the perfect opportunity to get and keep visitors on your site. 

We've learned not to take off our link building hat just because a link gets pointed to the site from high-quality external sources. We try our best to ensure that the value of every inbound link passes around all the pages within your website. 

After discovering this secret in Google PageRank years ago, we could see how valuable every page on a site is, so it became easier or and why it was so important to manage the linking structure of our clients. The rise of Page Rank came, but now it's gone, and we can no longer see PR scores at all. 

Today, we use SEO tool-specific pages and domain quality metrics. But knowing where our inbound links from external sources appear on a website is vital. It is also critical that we set up your site structure to ensure that we do not dilute the value of the can find the page. 

By streamlined navigation and limiting the number of links on every page, we can control the link value flowing to each page, therefore concentrating its value. This way, the most important pages are what carry the highest amount of inbound traffic. 

Our link-building strategy works hand in hand with the content on your site. We study how your contents are structures and figure out the content you want to have the most valuable links. Thankfully, gone are the days of homepages and flat sites. This means we do not have to do an extensive clean-up to keep the value of every link in check as the PageRank value is passed proportionately to all the links on a given page. 

Having your visitors click and scroll through your website isn't a bad thing. We try our very best to make the entire website interesting, which is why we spread some of the technical and deep-dive content further down the content creation calendar. 

By organizing your content around different topics and prioritizing what gets top-level focus versus content which are multiple clicks deep. 

Unlike before, a page is no longer limited to a single keyword. We can now think of terms similar to a term paper outline. There should be a structure to the contents on a page and the website as a whole. Naturally, the most efficient way to provide complete and relevant content that ensures a reader stays on the website is to arrange content from the high level down to specifics. Within a topic, it is possible to create another topic and so on. 

Ultimately, this practice leads to ranking on anything from a broad top-level search all the way down to unanticipated long-tail keyword searches for highly specific and detailed content that will be on your website. 

Getting the hierarchy of the content on a website is important for both internet users and search engines. By having content that is well organized, your website gains topical relevance.

When we present this idea to a client, it's common to face some resistance. Stakeholders may think that everything is important and be on the top navigation or the home page. We explain that doing that isn't wise because having too much focus and links interferes with building context for the content on the website.

Seamlessly, we deliver 100% original content for your website. Having completely unique content on your website helps build a strong brand and gives your audience a quality user experience. 

Search engines frown at having duplicated content in their result, so they filter out duplicated content in their result. And if you have the same content as everyone else, you do not offer anything new or unique, which makes it next to impossible to break through the commodity status and become an authority in your industry or niche. 

In some cases, you may encounter duplicate content issues within your website. This, however, doesn't attract as much scrutiny as duplicating content from another website. There are also reasons for having duplicate content that wouldn't attract any penalties from Google or other search engines. In such cases, we must map out and acknowledge areas where we have duplicate content. 

To ensure that your version of the content doesn't exist anywhere else, we rely on plagiarism tools such as Copyscape to evaluate how similar your content is to other content online. 

By knowing how to navigate around, we can accurately plan how we will use your canonical tags to fix similar content pages, duplicate contents, and the pagination on your site. From this point on, we can use your sitemap as a tool to better understand what we need to layer on the canonical pages and URLs when sending search engine bots in and out of the different sections of your page. 

Everything we've done thus far will be in vain if we do not ensure that the navigation of a site is crawlable and that only the necessary primary and other sub navigations are coded into each page. 

Having unnecessary navigation wastes your precious crawl budget and focus. What we do here is get the search engines to see all of your content and create an easy linear path to get to even the deepest parts of the content in the topical areas around your site. Our job also includes understanding the association between the pages based on topical relevance. 

A lack of crawling on any website will lead to missed opportunities of being highly ranked on keyword terms. Plus, not having your website crawled will make it look shallow and flat despite our efforts to build quality content in depth. 

Over time, our best practices are bound to change. Given that the tide of SEO will change, we need to improve our optimizing tactics, and this is to ensure that we always stay on top of our game. 

User behavior, website design trends, and search engine priorities may all change, and we will remain focused on getting you the best services.