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.

Relationship between SEO and Internal Links

Many experienced online marketers now know that to succeed in link building, you can’t rely on shady tactics or automated placement. These things must be well planned and systematic if you want good results. It is always advisable to build links in a natural way. That is what is good for your search engine optimization, SEO because of their delicate relationship. For a simple explanation of this relationship, internal links help search engine spiders or bots find and index website content better and faster. These links help to distill and spread what is called “link juice” throughout your site. They provide a web upon which spiders/bots crawl among your site's interlinking URLs. Once these search engine spiders or bots find your content, they can add it to the enormous database of information used to retrieve pages that match a searcher's query. That helps in your SEO ranking which enables site visitors to find you more easily. 

Internal linking greatly helps to make the job of the bots easier. If you can through deliberate efforts make the job of the bots easier, they tend to like you better and reward you adequately. This they do by way of better and faster ranking of your site contents. That can be really great for your SEO efforts. Here is the catch! If a search engine has thousands of pages to crawl and it gets to the end of a page without finding another link, it’s going to move on to another site. Even if you have more pages, it will take the search engine a longer time to find them. Good internal linking helps to solve that problem by keeping the bots longer and busier on your site. That is what is good for your SEO efforts and beneficial to your business overall.

Internal Links: Credible Pathways to Website Content

For experienced online marketers and bloggers, using internal links to the good content in their websites is like literally leading their website visitors by the hand to their content. That makes these internal links very credible and reliable pathways to the site content. For effects, you can work on your internal-links to impact somewhat on your search-engine results pages, SERPs ranking. However, what works best is to incorporate an internal-link plan in your bigger back-linking plans. Together, they both have some cumulative effects on your overall SEO strategy. You can constantly rejig that strategy by adjusting vital keywords, internal links and other essential elements in your website. If properly done, it helps search engines to discover and index your content faster and better. Doing so is the real key to being found easily online. And that’s great for the overall SEO strategy of your marketing efforts.

           

Because internal links form reliable pathways to content within your own website, they help bring in the much needed traffic to the site. When properly used, they help to lead site visitors and search engines to a successful destination. As many online marketers very well know, it is always a furlong hope to expect visitors to land on your website by accident. Using internal links to guide them is a better and more reliable option. The end results are always better too. Providing links from other pages to logical locations within your site gives visitors a simple way to navigate through the forest of these other pages. The easier it is for them to navigate and find useful information within your site, the better for your marketing efforts. As an added advantage, good links do share additional details about a product, reference a detailed analysis found in a blog post or point people to an informative page hidden from the main navigation. That makes things really easy for search engine bots and online visitors. The end results are always good for your overall marketing strategy.