Internal Linking and the Structure of Your Website
Your site’s navigation structure plays an essential role in how a search engine prioritizes the importance of each page on your site. If a page is linked within your website more often than others, it will have a greater PageRank flow. The greater the PageRank flow, the better it will rank in search engines when people search for relevant terms.
Ask most business owners, however, and they will tell you that they have no idea how their website’s internal link flow is structured. Most people are surprised when you tell them that some strange page on their website is gaining more traffic than any other.
Optimizing Your Site’s Navigation
To optimize the navigation on your site, you want to start by auditing specific elements using online tools, including Screaming Frog and SiteLiner. Make sure to always include special no-index codes on certain pages, such as your contact page, for example, as well as no-follow codes for all links that go to them.
Doing so will help you reserve your PageRank flow.
The best way to think about it is like fixing a broken or leaking pipe. Essentially, you redirect water flow, or traffic flow in this case, to pages that matter.
You want to make a point to index all of the pages on your website that share the same content. This can include tag archives or category archives, which are very common in the content management tool within WordPress. Yoast SEO is a wonderful plugin that can help accomplish this too.
Of course, you need to be careful when performing these steps as well. When you don’t index properly using the no-follow and no-index attributes, you risk destroying the rankings for your site.
If you aren’t 100% certain how to go about doing these things, you may want to start by asking for help from an expert. Here at Gold Level Marketing, we’ve helped many clients drive traffic to their websites using personalized internal linking in SEO strategies.
If you have any questions about how we can help increase traffic on your website, make sure to get in contact with us. We look forward to hearing from you.