Internal links are very important for search engine optimization (SEO). However, because many have no idea of their importance, they are heavily underrated and easily overlooked.
For many people, unfortunately, the navigation bar links are all one needs to be able to browse through a site. That is wrong. An internal link serves three major purposes:
- Guiding visitors to other important content and pages.
- Passing authority from one high traffic page to another.
- Prompting visitors to take action. For example, reaching out through your contact page or finding your Instagram profile to view your portfolio, etc.
This article seeks to give you tips on how to build internal links to better optimize your website while improving on usability for visitors.
Tips on building internal links for better SEO
Know where to place your links
- This is very important as some web content managers just put their links anywhere within the site. Remember to only place links where the pages have related content.
- Link from pages that have high authority to ones with lower page authority. Because just like external links lending credibility to your site, internal links from high ranking pages means a vouching for the lower ranking pages.
- You should place your links to pages and posts within the body of your content or article. Again, don’t place links where there’s no related content.
- Remember to always link even to your old posts. They still have information that remains relevant and should show up in searches. Does your old post relate to a new higher value article or page? Place a link in there. Do you have a new post that could benefit from the authority of an older, related one? Put in the link so it can do its job.
- Be mindful about placing too many links on a page or in an article. While it is generally recommended to have between 70 to 100 links on a page, it’s still great if you can do significantly less than that. Too many links dilute the amount of authority being passed through around through each of them. You’re better off without going overboard.
Make your links look good
- Use descriptive anchor text for pages you’re linking to. For example use ‘best practices for better SEO’ as anchor text to link a page to an actual story about better SEO. That helps make it easy for Google to identify the relevance of the page or article.
- Another way to add links to an article or page is to put them between paragraph blocks under ‘related story’. You can also decide to place such links at the end of articles. You get to decide.
- Also, to complement the ‘related story’ links, you can add ‘further reading’ internal links to your articles and pages. Make things easy for your site’s visitors to navigate from story to story.
- Always make sure to avoid broken links. Before you change the url of any post, do well to find all the articles and pages that have been linked to it, so you can immediately update them once the url change has been effected. Keep the links flowing. Nobody likes to be presented with an error 404 page.
In conclusion
Unlike external links that depend on someone else deciding how many links to point at your site or even whether to link at all, internal links are all in your hands to work with. They do for your articles and pages what external links do for your website, over all.
So go ahead and log into your website and start building your links by placing them wherever you can get a good anchor text.