As SEO continues to become more and more complicated the list of things that need to be done to get results seems to keep growing. One thing that hasn’t changed is why interlinking is important for SEO. Generally, as an SEO company, we encourage clients to start with the basics and then build out from there. That said, one of the most basic things you can do is interlink pages that already exist on your website.
The begs the question, why is interlinking important for SEO? Well, while links can be a complicated topic the general idea of SEO is to send signals to Google telling the search engine what your site is about. Of course, it is not quite that simple, but this is why interlinking is important, to send those signals to Google.
How Interlinking Affects SEO
Again, the main objective is to send signals to Google telling it what your website is about. Interlinking of pages accomplishes this by simply using silo content to link pages together and in turn making them more “powerful”. By linking pages that have related topics, Google will then start to understand more and more what your website is about. You may have noticed when you are on big news sites and the like, that they tend to link to related stories anywhere they can. This is for SEO!
The key is to link together as much of the related content on your website that already exists and then put together a content strategy that will allow you to continually link together pages. For instance, if you were wanting to gain ranking for “electrician in San Diego” you would want the main page about “electrician San Diego” and then a ton of support content interlinked with that page about related electrician topics. These pages then can be interlinked and point to and from one another to help “beef up” the page that you really want to rank and send more signals to Google related to what your website is actually about.
Choosing Content to Interlink for SEO
While the above sounds pretty straightforward if you are not careful and actually make things worse. Just as with anything else, it is crucial to have a solid plan before getting started. The main point is that the content needs to be related. We have seen some website where the content is interlinked and there is no clear relation between the pages, this can actually make things much worse. Think if you had a page about dogs and a page about homeless shelters and interlinked them? Now Google may think your site is about dog shelters when it is not. While this is a fictional example, you get the point, you must ensure that the interlinked content is somehow related or else your efforts could be fruitless.
Wrapping it Up
Interlinking continues to be important for SEO and this won’t change anytime soon. If you are looking for some “low hanging fruit” for SEO on your website, look at the content you have already created. The vast majority of websites are about the same topic over and over again and you likely have great content to interlink already sitting there. Now get to linking – hope it helps!