Webmasters ofter ask for the best practices for linking pages within the website so that visitors on their site become more ’sticky’ on their pages. This guide focuses on new visitors. Guides focused on internal linking for repeat or regular visitors and for SEO advantage are coming soon the Webmaster Blog. Subscribe to our RSS feed to be the first to know when they come up.
Listed below are 8 best ways to internally link your webpages :
- Get a related posts plugin. Related posts are great for making visitors browse deeper in your website and can also gently take a visitor to a completely different category of content on your website within 2-3 clicks. They also let you focus on creating useful content for the visitor, instead of wondering how to modify your current post so you can manually link to other posts on your website. However, this does not mean that you do not manually link to other pages when the opportunity presents itself.
- Keep it Simple Stupid. Not only is it important for your visitors to ’stick’ to your site, it’s also important for you to ’stick’ to the topic of the post. If something needs further explanation, create another page to and explain it there. Never loose focus of the current topic.
- Keep content categories in sight. Once the visitor clicks around a few pages on your website and finds quality content, they might want to look for other topics they are more interested in. Make sure they can find categories of various kinds of content easily.
- Provide the information, fast. It doesn’t matter if your colleague asked for the article or you read about it in your favorite magazine. Visitors don’t want to read your elaborate reasons for creating the page, they want the information they came looking for, fast.
- Provide variety to your content. Visitors don’t want to read 20 different articles about the same subject. Make sure you have content about several broad categories regarding your subject. Be careful not to provide too much variety either. For example : This blog is not just about SEO and Community Management, it’s also about Social Networking and Security. What it’s not about is coding and designing. So if we wanted to write about designing websites with Flash, AJAX, Javascript etc, we would purchase another domain and start another blog.
- Do NOT fool your visitors. Keep topic names that describe exactly what a visitor might find when they visit a page. Many webmasters link words in their content to pages which are only remotely related to them. Clicking on such a link doesn’t give the visitor the information they came looking for, instead it makes them feel ‘cheated’. More often than not, their mouse pointer swiftly moves to the search box in their browser to look for info they wanted.
- Too many links are your enemy. Do not link to too many pages in your site in a short post. Not only does this make the content harder to read for the visitor, it also makes the site look desperate for page views. As a rule of thumb, don’t include more than 3 internal links in your post of 500 words.
- Avoid phrases like, “click here to read more”. If a link is contained within the content words, like this, visitors feel compelled to click to find out more themselves. If it’s contained in a separate phrase, it seems like you are asking or forcing them to click the link.
Also read :
How to internally link posts : for repeat or regular visitors.
Linking web pages internally : SEO perspective
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Thanks for speaking on linking. I want to keep repeat visitors. Good information.
Question, why do you want repeat visitors on a shopping site? Shouldn’t visitors have enough confidence in your website to visit, select product and check out? You can always get their e-mail info and contact them later for any special offers and promotions.
Do you want me to publish a site review for your website? You’ll need to provide me with a dummy account and dummy card info.