Internal Links for SEO: How to Optimize Them

It’s not a secret that content is the king when it arrives at Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Every blogger knows that very well when creating high-quality content, and it’s essential to seducing both search engines and visitors. However, content alone is not enough. Internal links are here to support your SEO by driving traffic to different pages.

Internal linking is important to any website because it helps establish site architecture and spread the link juice. Simply stating, internal linking refers to any links from one page of a domain, which is linked to another page within the same domain. It can be linking to categories or primary site navigation, within articles to related content or the footer, etc. For the requirements of our article, we are going to focus mainly on editorial links, as they are the ones improving your content marketing strategy and, of course, you’re SEO.

Internal link building has several advantages as it benefits build page authority, usability, and connections between web pages, user experience, and potentially your rankings. This article aims to provide valuable tips on why you should focus on your internal linking.

Advantages of good internal links

Internal linking is essential in many ways for your global SEO strategy. Let’s focus on six different advantages of developing your internal linking.

Internal linking improves usability through anchor texts

Internal linking is here to support users navigate throughout your website. By utilizing proper and user-friendly links in your articles, you will ease your user’s navigation. Your anchor texts must point to relevant and related content that is likely to interest your visitors.

For example, suppose you are talking about multiple content issues. In that case, you can redirect your user to a previous article listing tool, thus preventing the duplication of the problems through internal linking.

Internal link helps spread the link juice

While focusing on external linking and backlinks, it’s essential to build your authority from other websites. Internal linking supports you to spread your link juice to other pages of your site.

When you make backlinks to a particular page on your site, this target has links to other pages on your website, therefore spreading the link juice. Consequently, you need this juice to go to your money pages, as having a great understanding of how this flows through your internal links is the main component of SEO.

Internal linking boosts page views

As said before, quality anchor texts can help visitors navigate your website. If the content you give through internal linking is relevant to your audience, they are more likely to read further articles. This helps to increase your site conversion rate.

Relevant linking will help new visitors discover your website, as followed links often enhance your page views. To be very efficient, be sure to have optimized your page speed to avoid substantial bounce rates.

Internal linking improves PageRank

Before explaining why internal linking supports increase PageRank, let’s define what PageRank is. Google has developed a metric to measure the importance of web pages based on how many soma plant buy backlinks a webpage receives. The score goes from 0 to 10, and even if the topic is very well discussed in the SEO community, Google continues using PageRank as a ranking factor.

A page with a high PageRank can further support its PageRank through internal linking by spreading link juice to other connected pages. Those pages will get a little boost regarding authority and boost rankings thanks to the higher link juice received.

Internal linking improves time on site

Linking to related posts can help you enhance time on site and lower bounce rates. Bounce rate refers to a visitor who is just viewing one page and instantly leaves your website after that. To reduce bounce rate, you can retain readers on a site longer if the content you are internally linking offers a real value. To monitor your bounce rate, you required to connect to your Google Analytics. Hit on Behavior, Site Content, All pages, and you will see the bounce rate for each of your articles.

The bounce rate is a significant number to track, as it has an enormous impact on your rankings. Indeed, a part of the usage parameters used in the Panda Updates are linked to the bounce rate, so enhancing your UX by providing exciting content on your website can provide you a step ahead if you want to be Panda proof.

Internal linking helps to crawl and indexing

Google bots are designed to rebuild a user’s thinking process. They’re going to visit your website and follow all the links and pages that are simply indexed. Making a solid and intelligent internal architecture will help bots find deeper pages that are not always visited. These links can give a boost to different pages and help you rank higher overall.

Now that we know the benefits of having internal qualitative links let’s focus on optimizing them. Internal linking cannot be done without guidelines.

How to optimize your internal linking?

It would be best if you had a good understanding of your strengths and weaknesses regarding internal authority. All pages are not born equal; some of your pages are more valuable than others. If you are an e-commerce vendor, chances are your brand pages or your top sales pages are your main targets because these are the pages you benefit from most.

I would recommend analyzing these particular pages apart from others by setting up specific strategies for each group. You could link your brands straight from your navigation menu, thus multiplying the number of links to these pages. Or you could attempt to set up lists of recommended products based on your top sales, using a category system to better inlink your total pages.

When you are writing new content, you can probably refer to other topically related pages related to the content you are writing. Tagging articles that are relevant to the topic can assist users to find topically related articles. These tags make semantic “inlink silos”, spreading the link juice and making them very important.