How you link your pages inside your own website can help you with ranking as well.
An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web page to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain. Hyperlinks are considered either “external” or “internal” depending on their target or destination.
Parent Pages are at the top of the domain name. An example of this would be https://rocksolidseo.com/contact-seo-specialist/.
A child page is underneath another page an example of this would be https://rocksolidseo.com/digital-marketing-channels/affiliate-marketing/.
The important thing to remember about internal linking is if you have articles or blog posts. It is very important to put the main category
The Value of a link
Google puts value on links. Some links are more valuable than others and the homepage of a website is usually the most valuable link of a website because that is usually the page that has the most backlinks. Although I have seen a very hot article outrank and outvalue the home page of a website.
So if you just wrote a new article or blog post you can push to get it indexed faster and boost the value of the page by linking to it from the content of the home page. One thing to note here is if it is in the navigation menu of your website or is a link in the footer of the website it will not hold as much value because header and footer links are toned down in value in Google’s eyes. That is why I suggest putting the link in the middle of the content of your home page.
The value of the link that you put on the home page will be divided between the other links on that page and so on.
By updating the internal linking strategy of your website you will update the freshness of the website which will cause Googlebot to index your pages deeper and more frequently on the website. So to keep your website ‘healthy’ it is good to go over the internal linking structure every now and then. When Googlebot follows the internal links on your website it gives it an idea of how the pages relate to each other, which pages are more valuable than other pages, and if the page is relevant to the parent or category page of the link.
Structure of the Pages of the Website
The main, most important page of the website is typically the home page and is the main “parent” page of the website. The next pages in importance would be the category pages. Then the pages that talk about in more detail what the category page is about would be below that and are called “child” pages.
Another name for the category page is cornerstone content. This content contains the most important information on your website and is the focus of what you want to rank for the most on your website. These pages typically bring the ideas of several “child” pages together in a very informative article.
The “parent” cornerstone content page contains abbreviated content of a “child” page. But within the “parent” cornerstone content page you can link to a “child” page that contains more detailed information about that idea. That “child” page will be dedicated to that idea only.
An example of this would be a “parent” page article that cites certain information and continues on. The cited information can be linked to a “child” page that would give more detail on where and what that cited information is about.
Related Posts/Content
At the bottom of an article or blog post, you can add a related posts/content section that will link to other articles that are similar to this page. This will help tell the Googlebot the relevance of the page and help you rank better.
Follow and No-Follow Links
When you link to other pages of your website you would typically make them follow links but if you cite resources that are outside of your website then you would typically make them No-Follow links. So what is the difference?
No-Follow links tell Google that you do not consider the link as important as a Follow link. Here is an example of a no-follow link in HTML code.
<a rel="nofollow" href="https://somewebsite.com/">This is a link to an external website.</a>A Follow link tells the Googlebot that you consider this to be a more important link to consider. Here is an example of a follow link in HTML code.
<a rel="follow" href="https://thiswebsite.com/">This is a link to a page in this website.</a>Anchor Text in Links
The words that are highlighted to link to another page are called anchor text. Google puts value in what you use for anchor text so it is a good idea to use words that are descriptive of what the link goes to.
For example, it is better to use an anchor text like this:
Internal linking is important for ranking in search engines.
A bad example of anchor text would be this:
For more information on internal linking click here.
Even though Google uses context clues (looking at the other words in the sentence) to figure out what the link is about it is a better idea to hyperlink the words that describe the page that it is linking to.
Orphan Pages
Orphan pages are pages on a website that are not linked to from any other pages on your website. The only way that Google can find it is if the orphan page was listed in a sitemap or linked to from another website altogether.
Generally, it is not a good idea to have orphaned pages. One exception to having an orphan page is if you developed a landing page that you want to watch the stats on. An example of this would be a landing page that was created specifically for Google Ads. Sometimes it is a good practice to create a landing page that has no navigation menu on that page because you do not want the person that followed the ad to your website to leave that page but instead make a sale, sign up for a newsletter or any other call-to-action that you would want them to make.
More details and examples of internal linking will be discussed in the paid version of this course.