Standing out with a website can be more effective by understanding and using onsite SEO strategies with a focus on website accessibility and navigation. Businesses want their website to be easily accessible and a pleasant experience for customers to navigate through. Understanding how to apply internal linking is crucial to optimize a website’s accessibility and ease of use. For small and local businesses, this may be an effective tip in standing out and being memorable, attractive, and popular with customers and community.
Understanding Internal Linking
Internal linking is the creation and linking of hyperlinks within a website for the purpose of connecting one page to another. An example of internal linking is overviewing onsite SEO with a hyperlink to my blog on website accessibility: Onsite SEO can be understood as optimizing mobile-friendliness, content, and accessibility with a website. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” meaning that applying effective SEO strategies results in search engines such as Google help push your content towards the front of search results. While not as powerful as backlinks, internal linking improves site structure, navigation, and user experience, while also aiding search engine crawling.
A Few Tips to Consider:
- Better Site Structure and Navigation: Internal links play a crucial role in optimizing website structure and connectivity. They connect various pages and sections to each other, providing smooth user navigation. An organized internal linking system helps with easy access to content, which improves the overall browsing experience for visitors.
- Keyword Optimization and Anchor Text: as demonstrated in the internal linking section above, this is an example of using anchor text for keyword optimization. This strategy of using anchor text helps both users and search engines understand the context of the linked page or have an opportunity to refresh some information.
Here is what using using keyword-rich anchor text in internal links can look like:
An online fitness equipment product page has a display of product categories and their buttons/icons/slogans used to access each webpage. A basic anchor text may be: “Look at our new arrivals.” A keyword-rich anchor text may be: “Explore our new collection of high-quality dumbbells.”
Internal Linking for Small and Local Businesses
Internal links are an opportunity to get creative with a website’s pages and relevant range of content featured. An example of an SEO benefit would be to grow in the community with other community websites. For example, a website can include a page on community service participation and collaboration. The content within it can be relevant to be used as an internal link for that website for other pages that focus on social responsibility. The webpage on community service would then feature external links to relevant community pages and even other businesses, boosting the website’s SEO. There are plenty of applications with internal linking; it presents as organized and resourceful and is a simple but effective way to improve website accessibility.