15+ Internal Linking Strategies To Boost Your Ranking
An internal link connects a page on a website to another page in the same domain. The main purpose of the internal links is to aid in website navigation, describe the hierarchy and architecture of a website, pass ranking power throughout the website and pass page authority from one page to another.
Some pages of a website have more authority than the others and the links from these pages will pass more SEO value and authority to other pages. Linking to these pages may improve your rankings. There are contextual, navigational, footer and image links.
Understanding internal linking
Google searches for new pages and adds them to the list of known pages. Some pages may be known to Google because it has already crawled them. Google discovers pages when it follows a link from a known page to a new page.
Internal links point from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They can be used in the main navigation menu or the content of a page. External links point from one page of a domain to a page on another domain. To optimise your website you can approach SEO services in India.
Key factors for effective internal linking
You need to keep relevance in mind while building internal links. You should group together topically-related web pages via internal links.
The anchor text should be relevant to the designated page and be descriptive. Anchor text should be concise and by reading the anchor text the users should get an idea about the overall content of the designated page. Add keywords in anchor text if possible.
Links can be placed in the content, sidebar or footer. But the links placed in the content will get more clicks because the links placed in the content will get more attention from the visitors. How a link is placed can determine its click-through rate.
Crawl depth refers to the number of clicks it takes to reach a page on your website from the Homepage. If it takes several clicks to reach a page then the search engine will determine that the page is not important. Pages with less crawl depth tend to rank higher.
If you have hierarchical pages on your website then you should link the parent page to the child page. You should link the sibling pages to each other.
Internal link building strategies
- Think of the visitor while adding links and will adding a link improve the user experience. Even while doing SEO you should add the links naturally keeping the visitor in mind. Use descriptive anchor texts for your internal links. You can underline or highlight the text to catch the reader’s attention.
- Link between pages in the body of the article. Some SEO believe that links from the body copy are weighed more than the navigational or the footer links. Link deep within the structure of the site as they are considered the best and natural.
- If you have a new post that relates to any older posts then you should get a link. If you have an old post that still gets traffic then get a link. You should link from old to new and new to old.
- Link from pages with high authority to the pages that rank high. This helps in SEO.
- Link from pages with high traffic to the pages that have high conversion rates.
- Use the targeted keyword of the page you are linking to in the anchor text as this will help to increase the relevance of the page. Or you can add a related link after a paragraph linking to your article using a headline which includes the targeted keyword. Write and use relevant anchor text as the user clicks on the anchor text to find the related information.
- The total number of links on any page should not be more than 75-100. Do not over do it. Fewer links means more authority will pass through each of these links.
- You should find and fix all your broken internal links. Bad links are bad for user experience and SEO. Use tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to find the broken links.
- You can find internal linking opportunities by using Google’s site search operator to find related content. You can even use the WordPress plugin or tools like Ahrefs to find suitable internal links.
- You should find and fix all your broken internal links. Bad links are bad for user experience and SEO. Use tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to find the broken links.
- You can find internal linking opportunities by using Google’s site search operator to find related content. You can even use the WordPress plugin or tools like Ahrefs to find suitable internal links.
- Use page-by-page interlinking analysis to help the search engine recognise the keyword focussed content. Include semantically related keywords in anchor text variations.
- Linking the most important pages to the main page internally is a common SEO practice. The more links you add the less juice you can pass. Choose wisely and link to the most important content, rather than linking randomly to any page or content.
- Linking with the footer will help to send link power and relevance to your pages.
Internal linking strategies
When you use an internal link from page A to page B you signal that page A is related to page B. A good internal linking structure can help Google find and index your pages.
You should imagine your website as a pyramid. Consider the Home page on the top, below it sections and categories and further below it the pages and posts.
Breadcrumbs help visitors to navigate back and forth through the website structure of a website. They start from the Homepage and go up to the category page. Breadcrumb navigation is a part of internal navigation.
An XML sitemap has a list of all the important pages on your website. It helps search engines discover pages on your website.
The hub and spoke content or topic clusters are a group of content about specific topics. Using pillar pages and topic clusters can help you build out the architecture of your website.
The cornerstone article is the most important page on your website. It should have a prominent place on your website and users should be able to click straight from the Homepage to the cornerstone articles.
Navigational links are important because they exist permanently on your main menu. They exist at the top menu and cover main topics, products and services. Sidebars are used to help the users to navigate to related pages.
You can use images to link to another page if it is for reference, an icon for a navigational link or a technical chart or graph. You should optimise your images and use Alt-text.
For search engines to crawl the paginated pages the sites should have anchor links with a ‘href’ attribute to the paginated URLs. You should also indicate the relationship between the component URLs within a paginated series.
Interlinking for Product Pages
- Make sure that every sales page has a call-to-action (CTA) as it guides the visitors towards conversion.
- Use longer breadcrumbs for subcategories and product pages to get increased rankings for the key terms due to increased internal linking and relevant anchor text. Another advantage would be that the customers will be able to navigate easily.
- Create content guides with short summaries that explain how your products / services help the consumers at every stage of the buying process. The summaries can be blown out into articles or blogs which can be linked together. This brings SEO benefits to your website.
- Internally link the various product pages like products within a section, different size options, complementary products or collection. This will also help in the customer journey. You can add links to similar products.
- Add internal links from each category to the main page. This will help Google understand the targeted keyword for the main category page.
- Link sales pages to how-to guides as this will help the customers.
- Link to landing pages through topic and city pages. Each topic page can be linked to the specific city page which can also be linked to a landing page which is designed to capture conversions.
Best practices for internal linking
You should offer a good user experience and create valuable content that leads through the customer journey. This will help to land visitors to your website.
Use the relevant anchor text and it should clearly indicate the target page topic. Relevant anchor text helps Google algorithms to better understand your website structure.
You should optimise your website for mobile as mobile searches are on the rise. Google uses mobile-first indexing which means it uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and rankings.
You should monitor your website and assess the internal linking structure. You can use tools like Screaming Frog to understand your top internally linked pages.
Conclusion
By using a good internal linking structure you can show which of your pages are important and valuable.
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