Internal Linking

Internal linking means the links that go from one page of your site to another page of the same site. A link from your home page to your prices page is an internal link. A link to a supplier's website is not. It sounds like housekeeping. It quietly decides which of your own pages Google treats as important.

Treat every link as a small recommendation. If five of your pages point at your delivery page, you are telling readers and search engines that delivery matters here. If nothing points at it, you are saying the opposite, whether you meant to or not.

That brings up the most common fault on a website. An orphan page is a page that nothing links to. It exists, it opens if you type the address, and no clicks lead to it from anywhere. Orphans appear after a redesign, or after a campaign that ended in a hurry. Here is the test. Open your home page and try to reach the page using clicks alone. If you cannot get there, most visitors never will. When Linkysoft takes on a site somebody else built, orphan pages turn up on nearly every one.

A menu link and a link inside a sentence are not the same thing. The menu sits on every page, so it says little about any single one. A link written into a paragraph was chosen for that sentence, and the words around it explain why the page is worth opening. Both are useful. Only the second carries an opinion.

A habit worth keeping. Each time you publish something, spend ten minutes adding links to it from two or three older pages people already read. Most owners publish and move on, which is why their newest work sits unread for months.

Linkysoft draws that map before the first screen is designed, because a menu invented at the end usually hides half the site. If you are planning a new website design and build, ask how the pages will link to each other, not just what they will look like. Our digital marketing team re-checks that map every month, because orphans come back every time somebody adds a page in a hurry.