The Ultimate Guide to Internal Linking for Incredible Results
If you master internal linking, your post and page will definitely rank higher.
When it comes to crucial aspects of search engine optimization, many people are aware of the fact that external links from high authority, high-quality websites are essential. In most cases, however, the value of the internal links in a website is often ignored.
In this piece, we will look at the basics of internal linking and how one can create a strong internal linking strategy that will not just boost your search engine optimization efforts but also make it easier for visitors to wade through your website.
For starters, what’s an internal link?
An internal link is basically a link that serves the purpose of connecting one page of your site to another page still on the same website. With internal links, the source domain (normally the site where the link appears) is similar to the target domain (where your link leads).
Why are internal links used by websites?
Internal links normally serve three major purposes:
- Help your visitors navigate their way through your website
- They aid in supporting and defining the structure of your website
- They distribute ranking power and page authority throughout your site.
If you have a large website or a blog with hundreds of articles, internal links are an excellent way of tying all your related content together so that your visitor will not have to dig too deep to read more or even miss any content that could be valuable to them.
How are internal links beneficial?
As you will probably see later in this article, internal links have numerous benefits apart from giving visitors access to additional related content. Internal links also aid in creating clear paths for search engine spiders to crawl your site and create a closely interconnected network of posts and pages. Besides, if you can easily encourage your visitors to move from one post to the other and to another, you can subsequently:
- Encourage traffic to some of the less visible pages on your website
- Take visitors deeper into your content
- Reduce your bounce rate
- Prolong the amount of time visitors spend on your site.
All these are strong signals to search engines that your website is providing high-quality, informative and engaging content.
Strategies To Create Internal Links
When it comes to internal linking, many people often wonder; how hard is it to create an internal link? How strategic should you be?
Similar to many other aspects of search engine optimization, if you approach internal linking from a perspective of creating a good user experience, you cannot go wrong. If you write one post and you know you have created related content, then there is no doubt that you need to add an internal link so that you tie the two posts together. And if you have not written an article on the same subject, it would be pointless to try forcing a random link.
With that said, it is imperative that you spend some time regularly thinking about your internal linking strategy and use the following tactics:
- Create Fresh Content
The only surefire way of creating numerous internal links is having a lot of content on your website. This is one of the many reasons why blogging is valuable for a business since it is a reason to regularly generate fresh content for your customers. Moreover, adding internal links to some of your blog articles will let you add in some valuable extras for a good customer experience.
Action to take: Just take time to think about what it is that people should know about your business. Are there any specific keywords that you want to rank better for? Are there any products or services you are looking to promote? In what niche do you want to be known as an authority?
Come up with a blogging schedule and make a commitment to publish a new article at least once a month (but preferably weekly).
- Review Existing Content
When did you last take a look at your old blog posts? You might have written about an area when your blog was just fresh that you have since address from another angle. If visitors are still coming across your older posts through Pinterest or Google, for instance, it would be helpful for them to be in a position to follow links to newer and related content as well.
Action to take: Do not focus entirely on linking back to your older blog posts. Look back at some of your oldest posts and add some links to fresh content that you did not have when you wrote the original article.
- Be Sure to Link to Relevant Content
Always remember that any time you have an internal link within any article, you are basically informing the search engines that all the information you are linking to is of relevance to the reader, that they will stop reading the page they first landed on, and proceed to the link for content that is of more value to them. Therefore, it is crucial to only use an internal link where your content is overlapping.
Action to take: Perform an audit of your categories and blog tags in search of overlapping content. Do all the posts have any internal links tying them together or is the only way a reader could group them is by clicking on their tags? You should add internal links showing the relevance of all content that is being linked.
- The Number of Internal Links Should Be Reasonable
Although there is no perfect number of internal links to use per page or post, Google advises webmasters to keep links on a specific page to a reasonable number. So what’s a reasonable number? We recommend keeping links per page under 100.
While 100 could sound like a lot, it is really not. We are not just referring to the anchor links within an article: search engines also view links in sidebars, the main navigation, header, footer, widgets, ads and so on, for each page. And when you have to incorporate internal links in a blog article, many experts agree that three to six links are enough. However, it depends on the length of your post and the links that visitors will find valuable to them. If they would benefit from 10 links or more, it is justifiable if the content they are linking to is helpful to the readers.
- Use Your Image-Based Links Sparingly
Although it is possible to create internal links by including them in images, your main source of links should be largely text-based. If you add internal links to your images, it is imperative that the image bears a good alt tag. And the best trick is to write the alt tag is if you were describing the image to someone blind. It should not be too detailed but rather a short and concise description. And under no circumstances should the alt tag have a list of keywords.
- Include Links To External Sources
Although internal links are essential in creating an involving website experience, you must never be afraid of linking to an external source if you find an article giving the reader more information about a topic on another website. Just be sure to create the link so that it opens in a new window, in order for your article to remain open instead of driving people away from your site.
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