For many years the value of external links to your page content has been one of the top priorities for organisations website, external links show that your content is trusted by other website authors and is seen as one of the top factors in deciding where your web pages will rank.
One lesser and sometimes ignored practice is to ensure you have enough internal links through to related content, whilst all the main pages should be in your top navigation and footer it is also important to links to related content with in your content linking to other pages on your website.
External links to your website are links places on other pages that link through to content on your website, they are important for 2 main reasons.
1 – They offer another way for people to get to your website
2 – When google indexes pages it checks what URLs they link to, if a link to your site is found on another website google adds this to your tally of external links for that page and adds this as a positive indicator for that page.
Internal links are the glue that holds the pages of your website together, they give your visitors a mechanism to move between the pages and read other content.
They typically appear in navigational elements such as menus, headers and footers and can (but not as often) appear inline with text and other content elements, these links offer a great way to move a reader toward to another page on your site that contains more information that they may be interested in or toward seeing a product or to our contact page.
Whilst other links on your site tend to stay where they are these internal links show depth of knowledge and can boost that google rank in a similar way as external links.
I like to think of a website a bit like an onion, each layer offers more and more in-depth knowledge about its subject area however getting to the middle of the onion requires clicking through each layer of it… As I am sure you are aware visitors rarely click on more then 2-3 links on your website and expecting them to click through each layer of an onion is ridiculous.
To get around this you can add links to these deeper pages on top level pages, this will promote the deeper page not just for visitors but also google as it will in tern start indexing the new link.
Firstly this offers a more structured journey for your websites visitors to follow, you are letting them know that what ever they have read there is more to know and there is more you can tell them.
Secondly if planned correctly this practice will greatly reduce duplicate content on your website as you do not need to re-write so much as there are other pages to fill in the gaps.
Thirdly your website will naturally start to grow, no longer will you be trying to expand your existing pages to show more content instead you will end up with shorter pages with specific information about a subject area which answers a question but with subsequent information on another page that is also of benefit.
Fourth, search engines will be indexing your website harder bringing the deptsh of your website closer to the top of their rankings, it may be that people are finding out that you have more to offer then what is obvious from your home page.
Fifth, your website shows a better level of understanding of its subject area and boosts your authority again improving your SEO rankings in google.
AME WebTech can assist and consult in structuring new and existing websites and we follow tried and tested methods to ensure the most important content is obvious to find from homepages, navigation and search but we will also advise how other content can be linked in to ensure you are getting every chance of each page being found in search engines but also to help with the customer journey through our website,
More links especially relevant links to your content enforces the trustworthiness and authenticity of your content to search engines. The more links increase the authority of that page and also your website as a whole.