Beyond the pages’ choice to be linked within your website, it’s essential to verify that the links’ set up is SEO-friendly from a technical point of view
The internal linking designates the links that are made within the website (therefore, it does not include outbound links or backlinks).
This is an important topic in SEO because it’s the internal links that determine the PageRank’s distribution in the website.
PageRank refers to a page or a website’s weight, or authority. It is acquired through backlinks, and is then distributed via internal links.
The internal linking’s design is generally done after a keywords’ study, which makes it possible to identify the tree structure (parent page / daughters, etc.) by theme, but it’s a subject that must be followed and treated all along a website’s life and evolution.
We will focus here on these links’ technical set up.
The following paragraphs will only focus on important links: between useful pages from an SEO point of view. The "contact us", "create an account" links, or any link pointing to pages deindexed or blocked by robots.txt are not affected by the checks below.
Check that a link is in HTML format
The first thing to do is to check that the internal links are set up as an HTML <a href> tag.
To do so, browse your website and do a "right-click > inspect" on the link’s anchor (= the text on which the link is located):
If you’ve got an <a href> tag like above, with the URL and the link’s anchor, then you're good to go.
If, on the other hand, you do not see this tag: it means that the link is set up differently, perhaps with JavaScript code ==> In that case, we must review these links’ implementation and replace them with <a href> links as above.
Analyze the link’s anchor
The second step is to analyze the link’s anchor.
It must correspond to an expression related to the linked page’s topic: either the main keyword targeted by the page, or a synonym.
Avoid "see more", "find out more", "click here", etc. which do not transmit semantics. If this is the case, those need to be modified!
Duplicate links to product pages
When it comes to product pages (or any other type of page for that matter), also check that a page is not linked several times from the same page. Do a "right click > inspect":
On the block above, there are 3 links to the same product page: a link on the image, a link on "Pilates classes at work" and a link on "learn more".
==> In that case, you must only keep the link on the anchor "Pilates classes at work".
If you want to allow clicking anywhere on the block, you can make the entire block clickable for the user, via the Jquery library for example.
Now you know everything about the internal links’ technique!
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