How Do You Optimize Your Website with Internal Linking?
Internal links are part of optimizing your website. Here is a quick tip about “learn more” buttons.
Video Transcript:
David: Bryan, as you’re thinking about SEO, what are the hardest parts of SEO for you? What are the biggest challenges, especially from the perspective of a developer?
Bryan: In my case, it’s probably like the stuff that I can’t build, like the backlink building, because you have to reach out and stuff. It’s not part of the SEO that we’re doing, and also the link building. It says something that I am trying to figure out. Like, how do you mark where it’s appropriate? Which page do I link to? Something like that requires some planning. I’m more toward my analytical skills, but when it comes to figuring out functions and when it comes to the link-building aspect, planning your structure, I don’t think I have the brain cells for that yet.
David: Yeah. They’re very different skills, right?
Bryan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David: Youssef and I, because Youssef is my link-building specialist, believe link-building is all about the relationship. It’s all about people.
Bryan: I’ll give you a good example. I remember when I was starting to build websites. What I would do is, for example, if you have a couple of pages, just put a paragraph and then put a button that links to services that says “learn more.” And that’s how I built links. I know it’s not the SEO way. I think for most developers, that’s what it’s like. So, that’s why it’s different when you have an SEO expert.
David: Yeah, I have a client. This client’s been with me for many years, and they have a very, very large website and all kinds of things throughout their website that are very helpful to people. And I just can’t break the client’s thought to say, link to a page with the words “learn more.” They just can’t think about it in another way. So, from an SEO perspective, we want the clickable text words to be whatever the website that’s receiving that link rates for. Right? So, if it’s a blog about widgets, we want the clickable text to say, “blog about widgets.” If the clickable text is always “learn more,” well, that’s not helpful from an SEO perspective, but it’s also not helpful from a user perspective. So, I have to remind the client constantly to stop saying, “learn more.” People know what a link is, and you can put a link, and you could describe what they will find at the end of that link in words. And they will know to click that word because they can see it’s underlined in a different color. But they know what that button, that link means. So, it’s okay. But they just keep saying, “learn more.” I’m just like, stop it. Stop saying, “learn more.” Yeah, they just can’t think about it in any other way. It’s hilarious. So right now, we’re going through a project and going through every page of their website. And we’re finding every instance of “learn more,” and we’re changing it to something that’s descriptive of what’s at the other end of that link. That’s just internal linking. That’s not even talking about getting links from another website.
Bryan: Right. Right. Yeah. That’s one of the things that I’m guilty of in my past work. Like I had an article about something, and I wanted to link it somewhere. So, after a paragraph, add a button to “learn more,” and it goes to the continuation of the article. Then if there’s something… but it’s basically like, “learn more.” Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
David: Oh, well, you know, you can only do so much, right? It’s not the end of the world. It’s not like Google’s going to kick you out of the index because you use the words “learn more.” Right?
Bryan: Right.
David: We’re just not taking advantage of all the opportunities.
Youssef: Yeah. You could optimize it more if you change that “learn more” into something else.