Table of Contents
- Wondering How to Add Footer Links to Your Website?
- Why Listen to Us?
- What are Footer Links?
- Why Should You Care About Footer Links?
- How to Add Footer Links to Your Website
- Step 1: Create SEO-friendly Pages
- Step 2: Figure Out Which Pages to Link
- Step 3: Design the Layout
- Step 4: Create the Links
- Step 5: Implement the Changes
- Best Practices in Adding Footer Links to Your Website
- 1. Don't Hyperfixate on Footer Links
- 2. Prioritize Your Most Important Pages
- 3. Avoid Overloading Links
- Conclusion
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Helpful Summary
- Overview: We explore the strategic importance of footer links in improving navigation, SEO, and user engagement. We also give you a simple process to follow when adding them to your website.
- Why Trust Us: We offer an automated internal linking tool that helps uncover and create internal links effortlessly. With LinkActions, you can easily add thousands of internal links, including footer links, to your website without needing manual intervention.
- Why It Matters: Footer links are crucial for SEO. They help structure the site more effectively for search engines and enhance the user experience by making navigation easier and information more accessible.
- Action Points: We recommend assessing your site's most valuable pages for footer links, organizing them in a user-friendly layout, and using tools like LinkActions for optimal placement and SEO benefits.
- Further Research: Check out the LinkActions blog for more tips and insights on internal linking strategies and best practices.
Rank higher on Google and boost organic traffic with Linkactions' AI-driven tools. Get started for free and add hundreds of internal links in under 10 minutes.
Wondering How to Add Footer Links to Your Website?
Footer links are everywhere. But a lot of webmasters and site owners aren’t aware of why exactly they are important. And as a result, many are missing out on valuable opportunities to improve their site’s search engine rankings and usability.
In this LinkActions guide, we’re going to change that. We’ll explain what footer links are, why they matter, and how you can add them to your website in a strategic way.
But first…
Why Listen to Us?
At LinkActions, we have direct experience optimizing website navigation and SEO through smart internal linking. Our tool has automated 1.21 million (and counting) internal links for hundreds of customers across all kinds of industries.
The bottom line? We know how effective footer links can be in driving traffic, improving rankings, and establishing trust with your audience.
What are Footer Links?
Footer links are hyperlinks that sit in the footer of your website.
To break that down further, they’re hyperlinks that connect one page of your website to another page on the same website (or an external link to another website). And since they’re in the footer, they appear at the bottom of every page on your site.
You’ve definitely seen them before—even if you didn’t realize what you were looking at. Here’s an example from HubSpot.
HubSpot is a huge product with tons of features, tools, and services. As a result, there are 57 pages they feel are important enough to warrant being a footer link. Now, here’s an example of our footer links at LinkActions.
LinkActions has fewer total pages than HubSpot, so we have fewer footer links. But just like them (and almost every other website), we use footer links to help visitors navigate, boost rankings, and more.
Why Should You Care About Footer Links?
- Better SEO: They distribute authority throughout the entire website, making sure that all pages receive equal attention and boost in SEO ranking.
- Improved Conversions: They provide additional opportunities for conversion by promoting other products or services within the website.
- Increased Engagement: They increase user engagement by providing easy access to related or relevant content. They also help your site act as a hub for your brand that connects you social accounts, customer service, and more.
- Improved UX: They make it easier for users to find important pages and content, find contact information, and navigate to different sections of the website.
How to Add Footer Links to Your Website
Step 1: Create SEO-friendly Pages
This first step doesn’t really have anything to do with footer links. However, you need to have pages before you can start linking to them.
What pages should you create? That depends on a few different factors like your website’s niche, target audience, and goals. If you have limited resources, the traffic and conversion potential of these pages is also an important factor.
That said, here are a few common types of pages that you may want to create:
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Features and services pages
- Free tools
- Pricing
- Product pages
- Resources and FAQs
- Blogs and glossaries
- Comparisons and alternatives
Not all of these will be relevant to your business, so pick and choose the ones you want to prioritize carefully. Aim for at least 500 words per page (ideally closer to 1,000) and incorporate conversion-boosting elements like images, videos, and social proof.
Step 2: Figure Out Which Pages to Link
Now you have your pages. The next step is answering a simple question—which pages on your website are the most important and valuable?
This could be based on:
- Conversions (this is probably the most common)
- Traffic
- Engagement metrics
- Brand messaging or positioning
Use analytics to pinpoint the pages with the most traffic and those that play instrumental roles in your conversion funnel. Then, create a list of these pages and prioritize them based on their importance.
Step 3: Design the Layout
Next, it’s time to design your footer. Simplicity is usually the best approach here—most sites use a straightforward columned approach with links to important pages, contact information, and social media icons.
You’ve definitely seen this setup before.
ClickUp’s footer links are organized into columns like Features and Compare. This makes it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for quickly (even though there are a potentially overwhelming number of links here).
The New York Times uses the same approach.
So, look at the list of pages you’ve created and see whether you can see any patterns. Are there pages that should be grouped together in a column? Are columns even necessary? They might not be if you’re not planning on including many links.
Step 4: Create the Links
Next, you need to plan the links themselves. More specifically, you need to decide on the anchor text (or the text that is clickable and leads to another page).
Generic “click here” links are a bad idea. Not only are they unhelpful for users, but they also negatively impact search engine optimization (SEO). Instead, use descriptive and relevant anchor text that accurately represents the content of the page it leads to.
So, to summarize:
- Use descriptive and specific anchor text.
- Avoid using generic phrases like “click here” or “read more”.
- Make sure the anchor text accurately reflects the content of the page it leads to.
- Group related pages together in columns.
With the exception of that last tip, this is how you should approach internal linking, too.
Want to automate the process of finding and implementing internal links? LinkActions scans your website continuously to identify new opportunities for internal linking and automatically adds them in your CMS.
This not only saves you hours of manual work but helps search engines better understand the structure and content of your website.
Step 5: Implement the Changes
This process will depend on the CMS you use. Whether you're using WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Squarespace, or another content management system, navigate to the footer section of your website. Locate the part where you want to place the links and insert the HTML code for each link. Make sure to test the links to ensure they are working correctly before publishing your changes. Finally, don't forget to save your modifications to make the footer links live on your website.
And that’s it—you successfully added footer links to your website!
Best Practices in Adding Footer Links to Your Website
1. Don't Hyperfixate on Footer Links
Footer links are important. But they’re not the only kind of links that impact usability, rankings, and conversion rates. So, it’s important to think of footer link as a core component of your overall linking strategy, rather than the end-all-be-all.
At LinkActions, we help webmasters and site owners automate internal linking—winning back hours of time and dramatically improving search performance.
How it works:
- Install: Add the LinkActions code snippet to your site. It works with all major CMS and website platforms.
- Review: You can edit, approve, or reject any internal link suggestion from the dashboard, and changes will go live immediately.
- Approve: Once approved, the changes will be live in seconds. You can deploy hundreds to thousands of internal links from the LinkActions dashboard.
- Monitor: Monitor your site’s internal link health via the LinkActions dashboard, and watch search performance improve via tools like Google Search Console.
LinkActions scans your site's content and creates internal links automatically. This improves search rankings, boosts traffic, and helps convert visitors into customers. It also gives you an overview of your website's link structure and tracks improvements over time.
2. Prioritize Your Most Important Pages
Not all pages are equally important. If you’re a SaaS startup, an ‘About Us’ page is probably not going to play a major role in your conversion funnel. However, if you’re a consulting firm, your ‘About Us’ page might be one of the most important pages on your website.
The links you include in your footer should direct traffic to your most important pages. And figuring out what those pages are is a very personal decision.
3. Avoid Overloading Links
While footer links can be beneficial, it’s important not to go overboard. If a page already has 70-80 links, adding 30+ footer links can devalue the link value that is passed to other pages. Keep the number of links in your footer reasonable to maintain the effectiveness of your site's overall link structure.
Conclusion
Implementing footer links is simple in theory, but takes some critical thinking and analysis in practice.
But it’s definitely worth the effort. A well-designed footer with strategically placed links can significantly improve UX, rankings, traffic, conversions, and more. So, follow the steps above and start optimizing your footer links.
Looking for a tool that can hel automate your overall internal linking strategy? LinkActions scans your website to find hundreds (or even thousands) of internal linking opportunities, and then implements them without you lifting a finger.
Try LinkActions for free and start getting serious about internal linking.
