In addition to good content, many other factors also play an important role for efficient on-page optimization. Internal links ensure both a linked website structure and a better ranking of your content. In this article, we give you important advice on how to get the most out of internal links.
1. Put relevant and meaningful links
Internal links provide so-called link juice (link strength). It is a combination of various criteria, such as the quality of backlinks or the distribution of links on your own website.
Basically, the weaker or more irrelevant a subpage or article is linked, the less link juice there is. This also affects the ranking of the respective page. Your goal should therefore be to link important or topic-relevant pages and to set these links in a targeted manner.
2. Be careful not to use redirects or links on 404 pages
It is not uncommon to find websites on the Internet that link subpages that have already been deleted or redirected via a redirect. As a result, valuable link juice is wasted.
We therefore recommend that you regularly check both internal and outbound links on a regular basis. Make sure that these do not redirect to nothing, i.e. to a 404 page, and adjust your links if necessary.
3. Avoid setting multiple links to the same link target
In online shops in which product categories are linked, it often happens that one and the same product is linked several times on a subpage, e.g. a landing page.
In such a case, however, search engines such as Google only evaluate the first page that was linked.
4. No links to pages blocked by robots.txt or meta tags
Another very popular mistake is linking to pages that are blocked by robots.txt or robots meta tags.
The link juice is transferred as desired, but no rankings can be achieved due to the blocking.
5. Optimize your internal links
Setting internal links is only half the battle. If you want to exploit the full potential of this OnPage measure, you should also optimize the internal links using the Alt attribute.
Most content management systems also offer the option of defining a so-called link title when setting a link.
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Conclusion
Support your content as much as you can: Very few site operators are aware of how important internal links are and how much potential they contain. It is less about the number of links and more about their quality. In this way, broken links on a page also affect good, relevant links on this page. It is therefore advisable to regularly check and optimize all links.
