SEO Internal Linking – The Best Guide You Must Follow

The advent of the internet has changed the marketing world like never before. Today, digital marketing or online marketing occupies a large area in this industry. The time has come when the internet is starting to reign over everything.

If you are a digital marketing enthusiast you may have known how big a role SEO or search engine optimization plays in garnering profit for online business. Although there are other branches apart from SEO, the article mainly focuses on SEO internal linking. 

What are the internal links?

In layman’s term, it can be said that the internal link is the connection between one page and another on the same website. In other words, it can be said that these are hyperlinks of a particular domain. These links are very helpful to Search Engines or in this case Google to navigate your website on the internet.

It has been seen that in most of the cases, the homepage, posts and menu contain these internal links. Using them in content is no longer new and these kinds of internal links are called a contextual link. Believe it or not, the proper use of internal linking can make a huge difference to your Search Engine Optimization.

Around 92% of the market experts are of the view that this internal linking SEO will dominate the ranking system of Google and other search engines in upcoming days.

Also, Read – Content Marketing Strategies

Why are internal links important?

The efficient use of internal links gives Google access to track the content of your website daily. These links are a sure-fire way of passing the authority between pages. Internal links also enhance brand awareness boosting the rank of your website.

Besides, these links help the users find more interesting and relevant content while checking out the site for a particular topic. This contextual relationship between pages improves user experience in a way.

According to the 2020 data, around 73.6% of the domains contain reciprocal links that direct the users from one page to another. If you dig deeper you will see that around 43.7% of the high ranking pages in the search engine derive their traffic from proper utilization of reciprocal links.

How many types of interlinks are there?

There are only two types of such links. The first one is the navigational link which helps the consumers land on their desired page in no time. These are found in the menu, footer, and sidebar of websites.

On the other hand, contextual links are hidden in the actual content. If you were alert while reading Wikipedia, you may have noticed blue and clickable links appearing in the middle of the text. A single click on them will direct you to another relevant page.

There is another special type of link called external links. They are also known as backlinks or inbound links. As the name suggests an external link is the link of someone else’s website. If you are interested in numbers, you will be thrilled to know that only 2.2% of the posts receive a link from other websites and the process is quite expensive.

This is shifting the trend to internal linking more day by day. The internal link boosts the page authority, whereas the external link mainly increases the particular domain authority. According to the report – 42% of Search Engine Optimization is dedicated to both internal and external links instead of prioritizing one.

Also, Read – How To Choose Prefect SEO Partner

Guide to SEO internal linking strategy-

A strategic approach of SEO internal linking helps the search engine understand the inter-relationship between pages of a website and to determine how relevant the pages are to a particular user search. 

With the help of the following guidelines, you can learn how to use internal linking properly.

• Value of website and its content- The first step in this direction is choosing the most important and best content of your website. To let Google or any other search engine know about the core content of your business, you should add multiple links to that content or post. Next, you should organize your website neatly and cleanly so that categories and menus of the homepage lead the visitors to their required section.
• Application of contextual links- Once you are done writing on several topics you should start interlinking them with one another. This thoughtful action helps the search engine realize that those links also contain relevant topics as the main content. 
• Some popular e-commerce sites use the link in the middle of the sentence and sometimes at the end of the content. Because of this action, there come suggestions while visitors are done reading their searched articles. Try to put as many links with similar keywords as possible at the end of the content.
• User Experience- The success of your website depends totally on the visitors and user experience. SEO is most successful when the user spends a long time on your website. But if there are too many links and websites on the top part of the content, visitors may bounce back to the previous page.

You put a lot of hard work on your website to make the content valuable and full of information. As the ultimate goal of the website is to earn some profit and sale, you will need visitors to stay at your website as long as possible and read the entire content you are providing. The links should be used in such a way that it doesn’t make the visitors leave within seconds. 

• Addition of post section- This is a vital step of link generation. When the website owner finds a post related to the current content, he adds that particular link to it. It has been seen that sometimes, this kind of task takes some time in determining whether the post is related or not. If you are dubious about its relevance, feel free to use any internal linking tool.
• Navigational links- The addition of a navigational link in the most important pages of the website increases the link value of a particular page. This Step helps your content emerge as a stronger result in the eyes of a search engine.
• Recent posts and most popular posts- Some websites interlink to their most recent posts to garner some extra traffic to the particular website than usual. This method can be effective in almost all cases. The more you will put links to the most popular content of your site, the more you will attract traffic.

For anyone, it is imperative to know the current status of the website before taking any measure related to the internal linking strategy. You can use free tools available on the internet for checking purposes.

The software will show you the number of pages receiving internal links, how many orphan pages are there on your website, the most dominant page and so on. With the help of these details regarding the current structure, you can plot an infallible internal linking strategy.

A well designed internal linking strategy helps you in crawling up the rank ladder in search engines. With the right anchor text and other data, you can earn recognition in search engines like Google and Bing in a twinkle of an eye.

In 2019, around 51% of the market enthusiasts admitted that this internal link building brings positive changes. So, go through the entire article and then modify your pages no matter when you had written them.