For both visitors and Google, a logical and well-structured website is key to user-friendliness and search engine optimization. But why is it so important? And most importantly, how do you get started? Read on to find out and begin making your first optimizations today!
Useful SEO tools you can use to map out your internal link structure include Ahrefs, ScreamingFrog, Semrush, and even Google Search Console or the internal link checker. When using tools like ScreamingFrog or Deepcrawl, for example, you can have the website crawled in the same way that Googlebot—Google’s crawler—would do it.
A crawler is a piece of software that goes through all pages and follows all links on the internet. This is how they identify which websites and pages are relevant and valuable—including your website. You can export the data from these tools to gain insights into your website. You can see which pages link to each other, which pages return a 404 error, or which pages have no internal links pointing to them at all.
If a page does not receive any internal links, it is what’s known as an “orphan” page. These pages are harder for search engines to find. This is because they do not receive any value from other pages, and it is unlikely that they have any external backlinks. Crawlers can only access these pages through your XML sitemap or if you manually submit them for indexing in Google Search Console. This is not good for discoverability.
For a page to be part of the “SEO spider web,” each page must have at least one internal link. In other words, there must be at least one page that links to the page in question. However, it’s much better if multiple internal links point to a single page. This makes it easiest for Google to follow.
Internal linking often happens without even thinking about it—for example, when you want to highlight a specific term or page and give people the option to read or view more about it. In that case, you include a clickable link ( hyperlink) in the text that leads to another page. Your menu and footer also consist of internal links to other parts of your website. This helps create cohesion between different pages and ensures that your entire website is viewed as a valuable whole by search engines.
Take, for example, a website like Oudersvannu.nl. They are experts in parenting and babies. Not only is the header clear and easy to navigate, but their blog posts also contain many relevant links to related internal blog posts. This enhances the user experience, which is the focus of internal link building. Search engines also pick up on this relevance. This, combined with high-quality content, ensures that the website is recognized as a reliable and authoritative source when it comes to parenting and babies.
In addition to using internal link building, as a marketer you can also focus on external link building—that is, obtaining links from an external website to your own website. This is truly a specialized field in its own right, one that requires a different strategy.
As a website, you need a lot of valuable content to be seen as an interesting source when it comes to acquiring backlinks. This refers to relevant and important websites that, according to Google, are considered authoritative and therefore rank highly.
Therefore, you’ll only be able to acquire external links if your content adds value for another party. The more valuable external links pointing to your website, the higher your ranking will be on search engine results pages (SERPs). Of course, you can also create external links from your own website to other websites or social media pages. The process for this isn’t much different from internal link building.
First and foremost, your website’s internal link structure is important to your visitors. You want to ensure clear navigation and design the website to be as user-friendly as possible in order to increase dwell time on the site and the likelihood of a conversion. Dwell time measures how long a visitor stays on your website after arriving there from search engine results. Google places value on this metric.
Visitors use the internal link structure to navigate the website. Be sure, however, to minimize distractions on the conversion page. The use of (internal) links should be kept to a minimum here.
But as a marketer, you don’t just want to create a user-friendly website for your visitors; you’re also focused on search engine optimization—making the website easier to find. Your website’s internal link structure can contribute to better visibility on Google; the more internal (and external) links your website—or even a specific page—has, the more value Google assigns to it.
Be careful with your precious “link juice,” so don’t overload an article or page with too many links. Think of this as the total of 100% for your page. If you have five links on a page, each link receives 20% of the link juice. The more links there are, the less value is assigned to each individual link.
It starts with organizing your website’s structure as logically as possible. Think of a website as a book, where the homepage reflects the table of contents. Most visitors will navigate to the rest of the website from the homepage, and that’s how Google perceives it as well. From there, you navigate to the main categories—such as overview pages or important pages that need to be found quickly via the header or footer. Below these are subcategories, such as a product page, which may in turn contain niche subcategories. For an informational site, these might be blog pages, for example. So organize your site in a way that Google can understand it and easily find your specific and most important pages.
As long as you keep in mind that the homepage is considered the most valuable page, you can use it as a starting point to build what’s known as the SEO spider web. Make sure it’s organized as logically and structurally as possible , so you can also ensure consistency across different pages.
An internal link structure should be easy to follow for visitors and readers, but also for search engines. In an ideal world, it should take a visitor no more than three clicks to navigate from the homepage to the most important pages.
Websites focused on conversion, in particular, can use internal link building to guide visitors in the right direction. It’s important, however, that all internal links are up to date. Outdated links or links that point to 404 pages will only be perceived as annoying, increasing the likelihood that visitors will leave your website sooner. But Google also considers penalties for 404 pages. These are a waste of your crawl budget, so you’ll want to minimize them at all costs. A good internal link structure is therefore an important part of your SEO strategy and definitely influences the rankings you achieve in the SERPs.
Are you in the process of optimizing an existing website, or do you need to populate a new website with content? In either case, it’s a good idea to map out the website’s structure. There are also ways to partially automate the internal linking structure, and there are more options for you to influence it yourself:
With these tips, you can get started on improving your website’s internal link structure. We also highly recommend using SEO tools so you can identify where there’s room for improvement.