As the competition to earn the top spot on search engine results pages becomes greater, you need to ramp up your internal linking strategies to lead the race. One of the most effective ways to improve your SEO is to implement the best internal linking strategies.

In this article we will talk about internal linking strategies that may fit your website needs.

Internal link quick overview

The primary purpose of an internal link is to link all the relevant pages on your website. In addition, these links make it easier for users to navigate your website and view interesting web pages.

When people enjoy staying on your website, they stay longer and view more pages, which in turn improves bounce rates, exit rates and time metrics on the site.

Internal links also play a big role when search engines crawl and index your pages. Without internal links pointing to a page, it would be difficult for web pages to index your pages. This means that there is a high probability that your pages will not appear in the search engine results pages.

Search engines also use internal links to understand your website and what your pages are talking about.

Finally, internal links convey link juice or link authority to other pages on your website. When search engines crawl your website and find pages that a lot of internal links point to, they classify the page as an “important page.”

Now, let’s take a look at the internal linking strategies that marketers use.

Optimizing anchor scripts (linking scripts)

When creating internal links, you will need to use optimized anchor scripts that are clear and relevant to your content. A good body text will increase your click-through rate, especially if the text used is of interest to users.

When choosing your anchor text, you need to make sure that the information on the linked page is closely related to the text surrounding the anchor text.

Use internal fasteners

Manually placing internal links on your site is a good practice, but how will you manage links if your website has thousands of pages? Managing your internal links would be a complete disaster because it would take up all your time.

If you want to manage all of your internal links, it is wise to use an internal linking tool. The internal linking tool allows you to insert internal links into your content with just one click. In addition, these tools allow you to define key phrases or keywords in your website where you can integrate internal links.

The tools allow you to automate your internal linking process which will help you save a lot of time.

Don’t forget the breadcrumb

Placing breadcrumbs on your website greatly improves the user experience (UX) for your visitors. Breadcrumbs are internal links (usually found at the top of the page) that show users where they are in the site structure.

With just one click, users can go back to a higher level than they are now.

Made with tons of high quality content

You can’t integrate too many internal links into your site if you don’t have any content. However, you need to make sure that the content you will be crafting is of high quality, not just for the sake of internal linking.

With high-quality content, you can drive more organic traffic while giving your users all the important information they have. The use of internal links on low-quality content may not have any impact on your site. If users don’t care about or interact with your content, they probably won’t read it. Thus, they will not see the internal links you have listed.

To make sure that your internal linking strategy will run smoothly, you need to craft content regularly. Most sites publish weekly, bi-weekly and even every-day posts. The amount of content you publish largely depends on the ability of your team.

Increased use of content groups

Content groups are like bubbles of information that focus on a specific topic. Each group on your site has a main page (main topic) and all related pages are linked from it. This way, search engines will easily understand what a particular group is talking about.

When using topic groups, you must link all related pages from canonical pages, and link the column page from individual pages. This is a technique of signaling to search engines that the home page is among the most important pages on your site.

In addition, having groups will also help you focus on the keywords you are targeting and allow search engines to have a lot of content talking about that specific keyword.

Aside from keeping your pages organized, using groups will help your users get all the information they need in one place (group).

Add links to related blog posts

It’s normal to include internal links in your content paragraphs. However, it is also wise to put links to relevant blogs after a few paragraphs. This way, you can use anchor text that fully displays what the linked web page is talking about (the full title of the blog post).

Putting links to relevant pages on your site after a paragraph can be a back-up plan if your site visitors don’t care about anchor text within the content.

You can also add a Related Post section at the sides or bottom of the page to have elements on your site that can attract more visitors. But, you should also know your limits when it comes to placing internal links. Having too many links on a page can sometimes seem spammy which doesn’t help keep readers focused on the content.

Perform manual interconnection

Automating your internal link building efforts is an excellent idea. But the manual interconnection procedure is also excellent. You should know that applications do not think the same way as humans and they only think about which pages to link depending on the parameters defined in their program.

This means that they may sometimes miss important pages that do not match the qualities they are looking for in the post.

This is where manual internal linking comes in. Before performing automated internal linking, you first need to select a couple of very important and relevant web pages that you can link to your newly created content. Once done, you can continue with the automated internal linking with your tool.

Next, you need to check if the important pages you have listed are also linked by the tool. If not, perform manual interconnection.

Create an ultimate guide

Drafting a definitive guide on a specific topic is great for your website. Your ultimate guide should contain all the information on a particular topic (it should be in-depth). Make sure the final guide is structured properly as there are sections that discuss every important aspect of what you are talking about.

Doing so allows you to put internal links each after a section that leads the visitor to other articles on that topic. As with the concept of content groups, you need to refer to the ultimate guide for search engines to consider it one of your important pages.

Update the content

This may sound strange, but performing a content update is also useful for internal linking efforts. However, you must choose the content carefully to update it. The content part must perform well in the rating.

When a piece of content ranks well in search engines, it means that they receive a lot of organic traffic. With this in mind, you need to update the content and incorporate new internal links into the content. This way, you can boost the ranking of your new pages related to the content being updated.

Go to natural looking links

One of the main points of internal attachment that most people forget is connecting naturally. Most of the time, internal links that seem imposed in a sentence will not attract readers to click on them. Reading an unnatural link will embarrass the reader; Thus he may not click on it.

Also, if you try to force keywords into links, search engines may refer to them as spam, so you should be careful.

The thing here is that you need to make sure that people will be able to read the sentence normally and that they will understand the context of why you incorporate the inner link into that sentence.

Boost SEO Rankings with Internal Linking Strategies

Internal linking is not a difficult aspect of building a high profile website. You just have to be decisive in choosing which pages to focus on linking to and other elements of the website that will give you more internal linking opportunities. With this list of internal linking strategies, you can start to have a better internal linking structure that will be beneficial to your visitors, search engines and overall rankings for your site.