30 Jan
It was Bill Gates who once coined the term “content is king.” If you run an online business, you know how crucial it is for you to get your content out in front of as many eyes as possible. Not only do you want to grow the popularity of your content, you will also want to provide your audience with nourishing, sustaining content they desire.
To get a high ranking on Google, there are a lot of different hoops, strategies, and factors you will have to jump through. It can be quite overwhelming to understand, especially for a marketer who just wants to get their content out there. So, let us take look at one of those strategies in particular: internal links.
The Power of the Internal Link
An internal link is essentially just a hyperlink that allows you to connect different pages of your website. These make navigating your site a lot easier. And when you have content that is easily accessible from other parts of your website, it allows your audience to spend more time on your site. They end up clicking on all kinds of different things, which is great for you.
This creates a ranking power within your website. If you have a lot of pages and posts that link to each other, and your audience is clicking on things, your ranking will improve. It also helps bots find your ‘obscure’ content and learn how to better understand how your website works.
If someone is enjoying your content, and you have a proper internal linking structure within that content, they’re going to spend a lot more time combing through your website, clicking on things, and getting to know you better. The amount of time people spend on your website is a huge factor in how your ranking is determined.
Making Internal Links a Part of Your SEO Strategy
Internal linking only works if you have a lot of relevant content on your site. Therefore, it is so important to have a content strategy prepared to help with your Google ranking. A lot of marketers and online business owners invest heavily in making sure they are producing content on a regular basis for this very reason.
It is important to remember not to just throw any links into your content as you see fit. It must serve a purpose and the relevant to that specific piece. Think of it like a roadmap. You want your readers to go from A to B to C and to reach a positive conclusion about what you offer. Just throwing any link in there might confuse or throw off some readers and cause more harm.
Creating Cornerstone Content
The idea behind cornerstone content is having maybe 4 to 5 different pieces that really define who you are and what you do. These are the authority pieces everyone should read. They are also the pieces that you want to rank highly on Google. No matter the different offshoot types of content you want to create, they should always link back to one of the cornerstone pieces.
The purpose of this is to define exactly what you are about. You might have a variety of different pieces of content that might not be so clear to some readers, so if they can link back to the cornerstone content, it will be more obvious to them what you stand for and what your message is. They also should not compete with the other types of content on your page.
You must also remember not to forget about repurposing old content, so make them a part of your internal linking SEO strategy. By doing so, it will help Google see that the old works are still relevant, helping your site’s ranking even further.
Content is king, there is no doubt about it. Making sure all your content has internal links will give your ranking a boost and increase the number of people who will find your stuff. Not only that, but it provides your audience with more information, which they will often appreciate. Just by doing this one step, you should see immediate results.