One of the most overlooked ways to improve your site (which I keep coming across time and time again) is good internal linking.
Your site probably has a navigation menu set up. That's all you need to ensure people can get around your site, right?
Unfortunately, that isn't quite so.
While a functional and effective nav menu is important, you also do not want to overlook the power of internal linking.
This is basically where you link to other pages of your site from within the page content - not just the navigation menu.
Internal linking on the page content helps for a couple of reasons:
* It improves the user experience by making it easy to click through to a recommended resource or other page on your site.
* It helps keep people on your site for longer (boosting engagement metrics, increasing likelihood of conversion etc)
* It can help with rankings and giving context to Google as to what a page is about.
* It can be used to upsell and cross-sell products and/or services.
As you create page content for your site (or review what you've already got) have a think about what pages it makes sense to link off to.
For example, let's say you own a law practice and you have a page about commercial law.
On that page you'll probably wind up writing something about property law (as there could be a cross-over between the services).
Rather than relying on the reader clicking on property law in the navigation menu, you can link the text in your page to the property law page on your site.
For example,
"We are also experts at [property law] (including commercial aspects). [Our expert team] are ready to assist you with any of these matters."
The square brackets indicate a link.
This helps tell Google that your property law page is about property law, and also helps engage your website visitors by encouraging them to click deeper into the site.
Your internal links don't all have to use all keyword "anchor text" either - you can see an example above ('our expert team'). In fact, excessive use of keywords could actually be harmful as it risks over-optimization.
I am a big believer in internal linking. I've used it to good effect recently on a client project (the site in question is davidkieser.co.nz - Send me a message if you need any advice on this and I'll try to help you out.
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