The Importance Of Interlinks In SEO

The last couple blog posts here at meaningful marketing have talked about how to create great local SEO content, and within those blog posts, we’ve mentioned how important interlinks are. As I’ve gone through those last two blog posts, I realize that I haven’t even mentioned why interlinks are important, so that’s what I want to do today: I want to talk about the importance of interlinks.

Why Interlinks Are Important

Interlinks are important for a couple of reasons.

The first one being that it helps keep people on your website longer. So, if you have an article or a landing page that people are on and you’ve got three to six or ten interlinks on that page to other useful articles, you’re going to keep people on your website longer. And it’s kind of a theory that’s been known as a click-hole. The click-hole is if you get on a website and then twenty minutes go by and you don’t even realize it, next thing you know you’ve been through fifteen or thirty articles, depending on the website.

And a prime example of who does the click-hole well is buzzfeed. You’ll be on buzzfeed, you don’t know how you got there, and you landed on an article, it could be something to do with “What The Cast From Saved By The Bell Looks Like Now“, or something like that. Then next thing you know, 25 minutes have gone by and you’ve gone through 30 articles just of useless information.

Now, your idea and your concepts shouldn’t be much different, but you want to provide your website visitors with some good, useful information. You want to be sure to keep on linking to good articles within all of your pages.

So, that’s the first reason interlinks are important.

The second reason is it tells search engines which pages on your website are important so that those pages can get better rankings for their own keywords or targeted keywords. So, as you write more and more of the articles we’ve talked about in the great local SEO content blog posts, you want those rankings for those blog posts to improve themselves.

The Bicycle Wheel Strategy

Again, the bicycle wheel, the homepage is the middle of the wheel, and all these other little pages and pieces of content that you get off your website are spokes in that wheel, so the more spokes you have, the better off you are. Those spokes and those pages are going to be landing pages for people who are searching a lot of these long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are any of these three to seven to ten word keywords, like ‘the best blah blah blah in whatever city you’re in,’ or ‘how much does your service cost in the city that you’re in?’ Those are long-tail keywords.

As you get more and more of those pages created, you’ve got to improve their rankings. You can do that by providing interlinks from your blog posts to those pages. And again, the more and more of those pages that you have, the more and more interlinks you’re going to have for those pages and the better rankings they’re going to get. Why? You’re telling the search engine that these pages are important. As long as you have the right anchor text, the linking to that page, to that other blog post, you’re going to tell the search engine that ‘hey, this page that we’re going to link you to is descriptive,’ and the text that is linked, that’s the actual concept of this next page or blog post.

Interlink Text Is Very Important

So, an example here for Meaningful Marketing would be we mentioned the word ‘interlink’ throughout a lot of our blog posts over the last three years. But we don’t actually have an article on interlinks, thus why I wanted to create this one.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to go through and find all those mentions of interlinks on this site and change the text a little bit to focus on the keyword “the importance of interlinks”. So then, we’re going to link that text, “the importance of interlinks” to this blog post.

Hopefully I haven’t confused you on talking about interlinks while using an example of interlinking text, but that’s what we’re trying to do, because we want this blog post to rank high for the search term “the importance of interlinks”. Hopefully that makes sense and I haven’t confused you.

The last thing on interlinks is to make sure that you use a very descriptive anchor text, so don’t provide a lot of ‘click here,’ where that’s the text that links to a different page, or “learn more about by clicking on this page” don’t have a lot of “this page” linked to the next page. You’re not providing the search engine with very good information there, so be as descriptive as you can in your text link.

If you have a page that talks about massage therapy for runners, anytime that you mention “massage therapy in running”, you want that text linked to that page. Make it very descriptive and make it so that text is actually what that page is going to talk about that the page is going to link to, or even the searcher is going to link to.

There you go, that’s a quick little blog post, and I guess the Soundcloud recording here on the importance of interlinks, we’ll see you again soon.