A successful internal linking strategy can be broken down into the following six simple steps.
1. Identify Your Most Important Pages
2. Link to Those Pages From Your Homepage
3. Build Links Between Them as Well
4. Link to Supplementary Information
5. Build Links from Content to Conversion Pages
6. Include Links to Your Taxonomies
Taxonomies like categories and tags help classify your content and also play a role in SEO. When it comes to internal linking, they also play an important role in helping Google discover and classify content. In order to take advantage of that, make sure your taxonomies appear on the page and link to their archives.
This gives search engines more to crawl and further clarifies your site structure. Not to mention, it lets readers explore more of the topics they are interested in.
Internal Linking Best Practices
Above is a basic internal linking SEO strategy. However, the devil is in the details, so here are some additional best practices when building internal links for your website:- Optimize anchor text for conversions. The anchor text is the text that appears as the clickable link in your content. Here, always try to use words or phrases that are relevant to the page you’re linking to. Try to go for anchor text that makes it clear what kind of content to expect when clicking it but that also flows naturally with the rest of the text.
- Include the right number of links per post. This depends on the amount of content and your conversion goals. You don’t want to overwhelm users with too many links on a single page. But you also don’t want them to feel lost with nowhere else to go. The best approach is to include just enough links so that the text flows nicely and you move readers to other content pieces naturally.
- Set some links to nofollow. Adding a nofollow tag to a link tells Google to disregard it and assign no value to it. This can make sense for links that are unimportant for ranking purposes, such as a login page. If you have any of those on your homepage, consider tagging them accordingly.
- Use internal links to send traffic to new pages. When publishing new content, take a moment to link to it from pages that already perform well and that are relevant to its topic. You can use the site: operator in Google to search your own website for certain keywords in order to find relevant places to link to the new post.
- Use tools to find orphaned pages. There are a number of tools that can tell you if there are pages without incoming internal links on your site. Yoast SEO has a section for that as do other SEO tools and plugins.
Internal Linking Mistakes To Avoid
Besides adhering to best practices, also make sure that you avoid these common internal linking pitfalls:- Disregarding relevance. Don’t simply link for linking’s sake. Make sure that when you include a link, it makes sense from a user’s perspective. As mentioned, internal links pass meaning and authority so don’t squander them.
- Using the same anchor text over and over. It can be easy to fall into the trap of using the same exact keyword or key phrase for linking to certain pages in all of your content. This is keyword stuffing and will get you punished. You want to make sure that you vary your anchor text while still making it relevant.
- Placing too many links together. Even if you have a lot of relevant content to link to from one page, you don’t want to stuff a single sentence or paragraph full of links. This can make it difficult for users to read and understand. Try to spread them out a bit.
