Internal links are a good way to send signals to search engines like Google. They signpost the most important pages on your website and indicate that your website content is worth ranking on a particular topic. They build on and improve your existing website architecture, as well as help your website readers understand and access your content leading to a better user experience.

Internal linking improves your website navigation

Links or Hyperlinks are the method used by humans and search engine web crawlers to travel between web pages on the internet. External links are ones that direct users away from your website to another website. Whilst Internal links are the ones that are used to navigate around your own website. The most common examples are main menu headings. It starts with a Home page link, and then proceeds to the most important top level categories and subcategories of your site.   

Using Links in the content of your website is good for SEO. Search engine web crawlers use them to navigate around your website and can indicate to search engines the website contents hierarchy of importance. When they are used with html anchor text (link text) they can also pass on keyword meta information that can affect your rankings. 

How to add internal links to your website

Let’s look at an example. Here is an internal link to our Website

https://lighthouseuk.net/solutions/

The link alone on your website doesn’t give much data to webcrawlers (or humans). But it is a method to ensure webcrawlers (and humans) find this content.

Now let’s add some anchor text (link text) to our internal hyperlink. I’ve added the text “Website Solutions” and now web crawlers have some context as to where the link directs to. Which will also have a positive effect on this page appearing in search engines for search queries like “Website Solutions”. 

<a href=”https://lighthouseuk.net/solutions/“>Website Solutions</a>

Modern website editors make this very easy to do for people who are not experienced with code. So you have no excuse not to give it a go.

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Google Alerts are email notifications provided to you by Google when its web crawlers find your keyword or phrase online. So if you set up an alert for your brand you will receive an alert whenever Google finds a mention of your brand online.

Setup Google Alert notifications to monitor your brand

A Google Alert is a notification sent to you by Google when it finds your alert query online. You can set up an alert to receive info about news, products, or mentions of your name. So for example you might want to receive an email notification whenever someone publishes something online with your brand name or product name, find out what they said and take appropriate action, such as sharing the good news / reviews. 

How to setup a Google Alert for Brand mentions

You can set up a Google Alert on Google’s website: https://www.google.com/alerts. Simply add the words or phrases you want to monitor into the web app and off you go. You do have some filtering options when you set up an alert such as how many results you want to receive and how frequent you get notifications sent to you, as well as the types of sites you’ll see in the notification. You can also set Geographical boundaries such as language and the part of the world you want info from.

If you’re familiar with PPC on the Google Ads platform, you will know that you can also use “Quotations” around your search query to have an exact match instead of a broad match search result.

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Alternative text or Alt text is a label that you can apply to images to give them more context. Which is useful for SEO and accessibility reasons. Screen readers specifically use the Alt text meta information given to an image to describe to a website reader who needs visual support. It’s also used by search engine web crawlers when determining a website’s context and semantic relation to search queries.

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Alternative text adds context to images

With the rise of AI generated images and Google Lens, computers have never been better at understanding images and videos. However that doesn’t mean you should ignore these vital elements of web publishing best practice. Adding descriptive alt text to your images means your website is more accessible, adds context for webcrawlers and is vital for your SEO optimisation plan.

How to add Alt text to your images

Most Content Management Systems (CMS) such as wordpress allow you to add Alt Text very easily. Either from the media library or the page editor you can edit an image and add the important Alt text metadata. 

If your CMS does not allow you to add Alt Text, you can do it by small edits to the HTML code. In the example below you can see we have added the alt=”” code into the Img tag.

<img src="img_lighthouse.jpg" alt="A Guiding Light for Businesses">

To make this a “quick win” we’ve suggested that you choose one of your most important website pages and make sure their is Alternative text on all your images. Once you have done that, give yourself a pat on the back, then set yourself a reminder next week to pick another page and do it again.

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Have you tried this quick win?

Was it easy to follow? Did it take more than 5 minutes and has it had any impact (so far)? Share your thoughts and help other membership organisations improve their SEO.

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