Internal links are a key factor in the structure of your site. They help users & search engines understand the layout of your site and know the most important pages. Internal linking helps websites rank higher in search results by redistributing authority throughout the site, which means lower ranked pages can see increased traffic.
What Exactly is an Internal Link?
In a nutshell, they are links baked into your content! Internal links allow you to navigate within your website more easily by spreading quick links within the text or images of your page / post. It’s also what you see both on the navigation bar, footer bar and within content. Technically they appear something like this: a href=”https://website.com/internal-page” title=”Anchor-text”
Ultimately your end-user will only see the anchor text which is responsible for redirecting them to another page within your site. That anchored text is a keyword or search term that becomes highly relevant for SEO scoring.
Internal Linking Plays a Big Role in Your Overall SEO Health
It’s a good idea to add links pointing to any newly published page from other pages or from within your blog posts. Doing this will make all search engines aware of your new page, and what keywords or search terms are related to this page. Also consider adding three or four links within your new pages content back out. In general search engines give pages with good quality and quantity of internal links a higher ranking.
Ideally you should:
- make a list of the most important keyword(s) you are going after
- consistently incorporate them into your content
- link those keywords within your content to their appropriate web page.
When a search engine notices your content is hyper focused around a certain keyword, it will consider your site to be highly relevant for those words!
Quick Tips for Effective Internal Links Usage
Keep Adding Fresh Content!
Search engines like fresh content so it’s best to keep your content informative, fresh, and updated when possible. Older content (especially blogs) tend to drop in rankings.
Link Naturally and Relevantly
Consider making your link less intrusive in order to have it seen as a helpful way of offering more information. Focus on integrating search terms that a user would type in a search engine right into your content and make those search terms actual links to your newly added content.
Keep a track of how many times you used a search term (or keyword) to be a link to the new page, and consider giving it a higher priority with H tags.
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