How to internally link your pages to help repeat visitors find more content
We posted about how to link your pages internally to help new visitors browse your website. This guide takes that a step further and will help you build better links for regular visitors of your site.
Who is a regular visitor ?
A regular or repeat visitor is someone who has come to your site in the past, and has visited again. For the purpose of this guide, we are considering visitors who purposefully came to your site again, not through a search result. These visitors are usually familiar with your site’s basic idea and some of it’s content and have come to your website to get more information. What would happen, if these visitors could not always locate more interesting and relevant content?
Navigation
You need to make sure that real content is never more than 3 clicks away from the visitor’s landing page. To do this, you’ll need to configure your site’s internal navigation with great care. Here’s how :
- Help the visitor get comfortable enough with your site’s navigation to browse around without help.If your website’s navigation is too complex, visitors might not be able to find their way around. For example, vBulletin provides a control panel to all users of it’s forums to edit their settings etc. and calls it User CP. It would be more beneficial to rename it to something like “My Settings” so members can instantly identify it’s purpose. Likewise, a photo gallery which is named “gallery” is more likely to be visited.
- Navigate right. If your website has different sections, make sure the internal navigation on all pages remains same. If you need to re-design your website, send out an e-mail or make a prominent page on your website explaining how things have moved around. Make sure all users can easily get to this page.
- Don’t do the disappearing act. Your website might have a blog, a forum, a videos section etc. and all could be designed with different softwares with different software-specific navigation menus. This may lead to mismatch in the site’s look and feel, and inconsistent navigation. Visitors get frustrated easily if they can’t find a link in it’s ‘usual’ place. Get help from manufacturers of all the softwares to customize them till they match the look and feel and internal navigation of the rest of the site. NEVER open any section of your website until it meets these standards.
Internal Search
Your visitors will also sometimes search for information on your site and should make it easy for them to search for content they are looking for.
- Uh-One, Uh-Two : Don’t hide away that search box on your site into an obscure corner, bring it into the limelight. We suggest having two search boxes on each page of your site, near the top and near the bottom of the main content. This encourages visitors to help themselves find content on your site. Plus, you get to enjoy revenues from Google Search too
It’s also a good idea to follow all the practices given in our previous post.
Also read :
Internal linking for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefit
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