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Last Updated on December 14, 2022 by Arif Chowdhury
To build a strongly interconnected network that boosts SEO, you should learn the internal linking secrets and their benefits.
Backlinks are required for your content to get ranked. Search engines like Google love it when other websites link to your content.
It is because internal links assist Google in figuring out the layout of your website by connecting areas that would otherwise seem disjointed.
When you define a site hierarchy, your top pages and articles may have greater authority than the less important ones. Internal linking best practices may therefore assist your SEO efforts if implemented.
Definition: Internal link.
The internal link is the one that connects two different pages on your website. Audiences and search engines use links within content to navigate your site and locate the information they’re looking for.
Links help site visitors go around and locate the information they’re looking for. Search engines also use links to other parts of your site. So it’s impossible to find something without connections pointing to it.
There are several options for internal connectivity. You can include links in the text of your posts and on any part of your website, including the footer, sidebar, menu, etc.
From now on, we’ll refer to these links as contextual links. These links direct your site’s users to more valuable content. They assist them in their quest for knowledge. In addition, search engines can measure the worth of your content by analyzing what information is relevant to your site.
A page with many backlinks (both internal and external) is well-known to be given greater weight by search engines. As a result, effective internal linking is essential for search engine optimization.
Internal links are the bridge.
Google’s crawler is specially designed to locate fresh content on the web. First, it renders a whole webpage and clicks on the first link.
Google can figure out the interconnection within a web page, an article, or a piece of information by following links. This way, search engines like Google can determine if your site’s pages are on the same subject matter as others.
How to use internal links within your content?
Your internal linking strategy must be evaluated and improved based on thorough research to enhance your site’s search engine optimization (SEO). Your website’s health will improve as a result of using this approach. However, make sure you check these below factors before doing it:
- Whether both page’s contents are relevant to each other;
- Whether it is worth to link between these two contents;
- The authority of pages.
One of the popular internal linking strategies is to build a pillar content with broad topic discussion, create smaller cluster contents, and use internal linking to connect to the pillar.
There are a few considerations while developing internal linking tactics. First, creating depends on the nature of your niche and business objectives, but the methods below could be a great way to start the engine.
Quick Note: Do not just link to your content because you want to. It will hurt your SEO, as well as your audience, be annoyed because of irrelevant links. So, the point is – link quality and link structure must have to be relevant. So, conduct proper keyword research and be careful when link building. In addition, your blog post’s external links must be relevant. Otherwise, the user experience will be negatively affected.
Method #1: Identify your site structure at the beginning.
Regularly, we encourage customers to envision their website as similar to the Pyramid structure. Beginning with your home page, you may go to categories, subcategories, and specific articles and pages.
If you can have done it correctly, your website’s menu structure should mirror this organizational structure. You should also check the guide to website structure; it will show you how to build your website optimally.
Method #2: Focus on top content from your site.
The next step is to identify which information is most important to the success of your project. See our page about the cornerstone content strategy if you need more clarification.
In a nutshell, it’s your finest work; it’s about the soul of your business. The “keyword strategy” refers to the information you want visitors to discover when searching for your specific subjects or goods.
You should often link to this page if you want Google to recognize it as your most important.
The audience may access your cornerstone material through links from various places. We’ll go through the most often-used settings for everything from the content of your post to the navigation.
Recommended Reading: How Do I Improve My Google Ranking for Keywords? (Beginner’s Guide)
Method #3: Contextual links provide values.
You should link to articles on a particular subject from a single page if you’ve published several. Due to this, the pieces will seem relevant to Google and the broader public.
Your article’s conclusion or specific phrases in your writing may include links.
Try to feature your cornerstone content as much as possible to Google by interlinking it with other relevant content from your site.
You must include a link to the cornerstone in every article on the subject. In addition, make sure each post in the pillar has a backlink to it.
Method #4: Chain network of interconnected pages.
If your website contains hierarchical pages, connect them and vice versa.
Also, remember to include the websites of your siblings in the link exchange. These sites should be connected to a well-organized website, and doing so in this way makes perfect sense.
Method #5: Auto-relevant post section.
You can easily include related post sections in your articles using plugins and modules. Whichever technique you use, be sure the pieces you’re linking to are relevant before you go ahead and make a click-through.
If you need more clarification, manually connecting to articles is the best option. Yoast.com does the same thing by selecting a related post and linking to it at the end of the piece.
Recommended Reading: Link Building A Pathway to Rank High on Google (Beginner’s Guide)
Knowledgebase.
Utilize No-follow links.
You should also check if links on your website need to be more relevant to SEO. For example, a promotional link on the homepage doesn’t need to score well in the search results. Therefore you don’t want to pass away link juice to your promotional page while using it.
Once, using no-follow tags on unrelated links was an efficient way to keep their link value high—using a no-follow tag to tell search engines that this link is not trustworthy enough or a promotional link. Therefore, search engines won’t pass link juice.
By using the no-follow tag, the less essential links, and increasing the link value of those still relevant, you’re helping your site rank higher in search results. However, this approach is no longer practical because Google has improved over the years.
The value of the no-follow link does not seem to transfer value immediately to other pages. However, at this point, it looks as if it has become true.
The link with a no-follow tag won’t hold much value if utilized instead of a regular link. Instead of not following some links, you prioritize fewer links to search engines to rank, which is a good practice.
Quick Note: A simple strategy is that those links are important to you; tag them with do-follow links, and if they are not, tag them no-follow. Also, use the Google search console to find orphan pages from your site and more links pointing to them. Finally, scan your site and find if there are any broken links, then fix them as soon as possible.
Keyword-rich anchor text.
Identifying the most relevant content to link with is the first step.
Guests may click on the link text if it catches their attention.
If you optimize your anchor text too much, it may hurt your website’s search engine rankings. Conversely, when you over-optimize your content, you stuff it with keywords to boost your search engine rankings.
For a long time, you might anticipate a boost in Google ranks for a term by stuffing every anchor text with the same keyword.
Nowadays, Google can recognize any trick you may utilize.
To put it another way, anchor text in your content should look and sound natural. You may use keywords in the anchor text, but you should not repeat the exact anchor text every time.
Do internal links count as backlinks?
Internal links are not backlinks; an internal link is essential to your site structure. Since they can improve your site’s Google ranking by providing more context for the search engine, you can tell Google which sections are most important and what they’re about by linking them and using descriptive anchor text.
How many internal links are good?
The answer is – as much as needed. If you think only 4-5 relevant internal links exist, link this much. There is no hardcore number; it depends on your site content and relevancy.
Types of internal links.
There are four different kinds of internal links exist that you should be aware of: contextual links (link within the article body), navigational links (from the site menu), footer links (at the bottom of the site), and image links (links from images).
Conclusion.
Before I wrap up my guide, I hope you realize the internal linking secrets and why it is vital for your SEO success.
The best practice in link-building, whether internal or external, is to make it natural if you don’t want to get penalized. Only link to a piece of information if it’s essential; otherwise, don’t.
Google and other search engines are getting smarter by the day; therefore, your methods will not be enough to defeat them. That is why you should proceed naturally.
That was a really impressive write-up! That topic cluster was worth time and I will definitely follow it. I have read about this plug-in for automatic internal linking. It’s called internallinkjuicer.com. I read its feedback and found out that it was really good. May I know what you think about it?