To Understand SEO Internal Linking Visit The Nearest Shopping Mall

Last week I had some free time, so I decided to buy a fresh pair of sneakers I badly needed for my morning jogging.

The shopping mall where I soon landed was abuzz with activity. It was mid-afternoon, and the sub-tropical sun blazed outside. The inside though was cool, people loitering with purpose, or so it seemed. Among the many youngsters moving about most were stationed at places where a bit of privacy could be snatched.

Being there on rare occasions, the mall to me looked different each time I stepped in. This time it wasn’t any different.

I moved about listlessly, unable to locate the sports shoe shop where I thought it should be. I did come across some high-end shops carrying labels I only gazed at. But not the budget shop I was looking for.

Around the corner there was this odd coffee shop where I paused to let my disappointment sink in…when suddenly I located the ‘clue’ to my puzzle.

Up ahead where the stairs started and a branch led to another part of the mall there was a board. The board had the directions to the several parts of the mall, and more specifically to the different shopping zones.

There…I could locate my budget shop easily which was one storey below, around the same place where I now stood. Looking around I did see several such boards at important places that gave directions similar to the one near me.

Funny I didn’t see them, funnier still that I went past my budget shop at least twice but couldn’t ‘see’ it.

A shopping mall is pretty much like a website. The mall attracts crowds of people because it has many shops, small, large, and very large. And it also has entertainments – the cinemas, the parlors, the restaurants, the food courts, and so on.

Contents of a shopping mall are the numerous destinations of different hues that attract, retain, and convert swarms of people to interested buyers. The contents of a website are products, articles and posts of different types including text, image, audio, and video that allure visitors to come in and seek the solutions to their needs.

Imagine a shopping mall without directions. There are hardly any. It’s not only that the visitors benefit from those directions like I did when I wanted to buy my sneakers. Unless there are directions, the shops in the far corners will not be able to garner enough business. This in turn will not be welcome news for the mall owners.

In a website the story is nearly the same. When you write a post, there will be portions in it which will need references to other articles you’ve written in the past. This is not only good for the SEO of your website; this is good for the visitors as well.

The search engines consider site structure and internal linking as 2 important indicators of the ‘soundness’ of a website. If there are very few internal links, it indicates that the posts in the website are not related to one another. And that in turn means the website has no clear focus which is not the kind of signal good for you.

So the next time you feel challenged over the needs for internal linking in your website, head straight to the nearest shopping mall, and enjoy coffee while feeling the pulse of the needs and wishes of the crowd around you.

Who knows you might even get a good story to write on!