8 Tips for Crafting Effective Internal Linking Strategy to Boost SEO

In content marketing, an internal link is a link from one page of your website to another. These links have a very important marketing role to play in digital marketing. They are essentially used to help visitors navigate between pages on your site. Technically, they also help to provide search engines with an indication of the structure and relevance of your web pages. For marketing purposes, internal linking is one of the most powerful SEO strategies you can use to improve your website’s visibility and rankings. If well used, internal links can be quite relevant and helpful for both website visitors and search engine crawlers. If you strategically place links within your content, you can direct users to valuable pages on your site and at the same time help search engines understand the structure of the website. You can therefore create an effective internal linking strategy to boost your SEO efforts, your ranking, your visibility, user engagement and to get more visitors to your content.

The following 8 tips are handy to help you create a successful internal linking strategy that can help boost your SEO efforts and get more organic traffic to your website.

1. Use Natural Language in Your Content

The right language matters a lot in content marketing. If readers and search engines don’t understand your content, it is pretty difficult for them to react positively to it. Search engines won’t be able to understand and rank it well. By using natural language when writing internal links, it makes your content sound more natural in the eyes of readers and search engines. It also helps to make it easier for readers to understand what you’re trying to say. Natural language helps search engines to better understand the context of each page on your website and how they’re related to one another.

2. Always Add a Related Posts Section

If you make sure to add a related posts section to the end of each blog post, it can help to get more traffic to your content and boost engagement. That is great for SEO as well. Adding related posts section to the end of each blog post is helpful for SEO since search engines usually consider links between pages when deciding how to rank the pages in their SERPs. They also provide an excellent opportunity to link to older content that you may not have linked to previously. This is great for SEO as well.

3. Make Sure Your Links Are Relevant

Major search engines particularly Google do not like junk content. Neither do readers. So, before adding an internal link, ensure it makes sense for visitors and search engines to click through to the page you’re linking to. That is where relevance really matters. When people click on your link only to find irrelevant content, chances are, they’ll likely go back to the search engine results page and look for something more relevant. This is why you must make sure your links are always relevant to the content they are linked to. Doing so helps to enhance user-experience and it pleases search engines as well.

4. Clearly Identify Your Pillar Pages

Technically, pillar pages are the most important pages on your website. They should ideally form the foundation of your internal linking strategy. For this reason, whenever you write about any topic, be sure to link it to the appropriate pillar page. Doing so helps search engines to understand the core topics your website covers and how they’re related. That helps your SEO and your page rankings.

5. Make Your Anchor Text is Descriptive

Anchor text is the body of words that are linked to a web page. If your anchor text is really descriptive and has the target keywords, it helps your SEO. Therefore, always make sure to use descriptive anchor text when creating internal links. Doing so helps readers and search engines to have a clear indication of what they’ll find if they click through. This strategy is quite effective if your target keywords are placed in the anchor text strategically.

6. Ignore Internal Linking Penalty

You can use internal links on your content as much as convenient without any fear of penalties from search engines. This is very much unlike external links though that you’ll have to use with great caution for fear of penalties. There’s no penalty for excessive internal linking, and as such, you don’t need to be afraid to add as many helpful internal links as you need. The more internal links you use, the better, provided the links are relevant and useful to the content. Just ignore linking penalties and do your own thing by internally linking your content as much as you want. That’s great for your SEO.

7. Boost Visibility for Your New Pages

Whenever you create a new page on your website, for SEO purposes, you must endeavor to boost its visibility by linking to it from other pages. Doing so encourages search engines to index the page faster. Visibility is also greatly boosted for new pages if you link them from social media posts, email newsletters and other online channels as well. This greatly helps the SEO for the new pages, boost their rankings and drive more organic traffic to them.

8. Spread Your Links Well Out Strategically

When adding internal links to your content, it helps your SEO if you spread them throughout the content. Avoid inserting too many links in a single piece of content since it can be quite a put-off for readers. Too many links in a single piece of content can directly lead to lower engagement metrics. If you spread your links out well enough, it can help to ensure that visitors get more of the information they need without being overwhelmed by too many links.

Summing Up

When used on your website content, internal links are an essential element of SEO. They help search engines to rank your content in their SERPs. If properly done, internal linking can help your website become more organized and easier to navigate for users and search engine crawlers alike. The foregoing tips can help you to get that done in a beneficial manner. Ultimately, you can thus create a successful internal linking strategy that is capable of giving your website a real boost in rankings and organic traffic.