Lots of SEO practitioners in Orange County will tell you about the importance of external links for your business website, and they’re not wrong. However, if your site is lacking in internal links, then you’re missing out on a lot of positive attention from Google.

Internal linking is white hat SEO that you should never neglect. Here is an explanation of why internal linking should always be on your list of things to do when it comes to your website.

Why Google Likes Internal Links

Google uses internal links for several things, but foremost among them is that it discovers new content through them. If you publish a new web page and you don’t link to it from somewhere else on your site, then Google is going to ignore it, unless you have an up-to-date sitemap. That is because their web crawlers cannot find it.

Pages without internal links are sometimes referred to as orphan pages. If you have a lot of them on your site, Orange County, then they’re probably not getting much attention either from search engines or potential customers unless one of them happens to stumble across it while searching your site.

Google also uses PageRank now, and if a page has internal linking, that allows PageRank to better process it. Generally, the more internal linking a page has to support it, the higher its PageRank is going to be. Google uses the anchor text of internal links in its ranking system as well.

Internal Linking Structures

As your Orange County company looks to optimize your site, you should be sure that each page has multiple internal links, but only to places that make sense. While it is vital that you recognize the importance of internal linking, if you’re doing so indiscriminately, it’s going to hurt rather than help you.

Think about setting up a system where topically-related web pages on your site are linked together internally. The more elaborate your setup, the better Google is going to like it, and the less likely it is that the crawlers are going to miss anything of import.

Internal linking is a simple, useful SEO technique that every Orange County company should know how to do. If you’re not sure about the best way to do it, hire someone who can. Your internal link strategy should be as strong as your external one.