A likely problem that could be frustrating if you’re a new webmaster is getting Google and the search engines to crawl the pages on your website. And what happens is that when you launch a new website, Google’s not sure why they should care. They’re going to crawl the site, but they’re not going to crawl the entire website. They’re going to look at just the top-level pages.
One trick we use to get search engines to look at the entire site or the content that you want them to see besides the site map, which we discussed earlier, is to create internal links. You want to take those top-level pages, and you want to link to the other pages with the content inside your site. You don’t want to be spammy about it, but you want it to be natural.
An excellent way to do it is to use something called breadcrumbs, which are a path or chain of links underneath your navigation that shows people where they’ve already been so they can find their way back to the home page or landing page on your website.
One thing you want to be careful of is that Google tends at first to look above the fold. That’s the initial portion of the page that’s visible from your browser before you scroll. So Google doesn’t even read the entire page. Putting your links at the bottom is something that you want to avoid. If it’s a blog, I like to put recent articles at the top, or a list of things that are related or having maybe a table of contents or index that people can click on if it’s a subject that has multiple topics.
One other thing to be mindful of is ADA compliance and people who have trouble with their vision. Some people have supportive equipment that will list out all the links, and it’ll separate the links from a page. If you don’t have descriptive Ahref text for your links, then they’re not going to know what it is. So if you have something that says “click here” or it is stuffed with keywords, it’s not going to be friendly to those people.
People need to understand link text when it is out of context. So a great practice is to describe the link, which is also favored by the search engines. When you follow these practices, you’ll see the results when you go into your search console or webmaster tools. You’ll see that more pages are being crawled and that you’re showing up in more places.