In our series titled “SEO Made Easy,” industry experts share their insights on effective internal site linking to optimize both SEO and user engagement. Demonstrated through clear anchor text, a balanced number of links, and strategically placed internal links, these guidelines are intended to improve user navigation and site discoverability.
SEO expert Martin Splitt explained that cleverly placed internal links can increase content visibility and streamline user experience, which can help search engines understand the relationships between web pages and improve a website’s ranking.
Splitt highlighted the power of internal links in driving visitor engagement, helping search engines understand a website’s structure, and enhancing a website’s placement on search engine result pages. Splitt’s recommendations are based on three main aspects: user navigation, search engine crawling, and effective HTML practices.
Splitt emphasized the need for a clear navigation structure, explaining its importance in guiding users throughout the site and helping Google’s crawling bots navigate, discover new pages, and understand how pages are related. He also stressed the importance of using precise HTML elements, especially those with href attributes, to create effective links. We emphasized the importance of using tags.
A relevant navigation structure should be user-friendly and easily parsed by Google’s crawling bots.
Improve your SEO with effective internal links
Presenting your website’s primary URLs to Google through a well-structured and up-to-date sitemap will aid in efficient crawling and indexing. With regards to effective HTML practices, Splitt highlighted the role that key attributes play in making your web pages more accessible and SEO-friendly. Splitt said that checking and adjusting these SEO practices annually is paramount to continued performance improvement.
Split then explained the importance of using clear and meaningful anchor text for links. He also advised against overusing internal links. Planning and creating logical connections between related content will make the main theme clear and will not overwhelm users. Split emphasized the need to balance external links with the relevance of the linked content.
He warned against using non-standard elements as links and advocated for following HTML structure and coding standards. Non-standard practices can cause problems with user-friendly features like keyboard navigation and screen readers. Splitt noted that maintaining valid, semantic HTML is important to promote a seamless user experience and robust SEO performance.
