Internal Linking Guide To Improve SEO & Help You Get Better Rankings

Internal Linking for Massive SEO Results. Why & How to Do Internal Link Building

You’ve probably heard about internal linking a lot, because everyone is talking about it. But what’s all the fuss about? Should you really bother doing it? Is it really that effective? If yes, why? There are many questions to be answered.

During our cognitiveSEO talks, many guests talked about the importance of interlinking between your own web pages. Therefore we decided to tackle this subject and let you know about the best internal linking strategies.

Internal links work just like backlinks. However, backlinks are hyperlinks between two different websites. When you link to another website from your own website, you call that link an external link. When you link within your own website, you call those links internal links.

What Is Internal Linking and Why Does It Help SEO

Internal links are hyperlinks between two pages of the same website.

A proper internal linking strategy can really boost your ranking power because it does two things:

#1: It helps search engines understand the structure of your website, how different pages interact with one another and which pages are truly important within the structure of your website.

#2: It helps users navigate the website and it keeps users on the website by providing relevant content through links that can be followed. This ultimately sends search engines another signal that your website is great, because it provides a good user experience.

These things can account for why Google boosts websites that take internal linking seriously. It’s not just a matter of adding ranking factors to Google’s algorithm, but it actually helps users have a better experience with your website. They’re both considered ranking factors.

Internal Linking Basics

To be able to implement a good and effective internal linking strategy quickly, we must first understand the basics of internal link building. When you link from one page to another, you should keep these things in mind, both for best results and avoiding penalties.

1. Structure & Hierarchy

Your website’s structure is very important for its success on search engines. The site structure is bound to internal links, because search engines use internal links for SEO and, most importantly, to crawl your website.

The link structure of your website is critical because it dictates the importance of its pages. Your HomePage stands at the top. All pages on your site usually link to your homepage, considering you have a header and a logo with a hyperlink on it.

For informational websites, link structure is pretty simple. Article URLs are usually right after the root domain. Most blogs and news sites also have a category hierarchy, which can be more or less important to webmasters. Interlinking usually happens only between the articles and a few more pages.

Then, we have fully hierarchical websites, such as online stores and business websites listing services, maybe some local businesses. A hierarchically structured website shouldn’t put unimportant categories side by side with important ones, as siblings, but rather as their children. This will help point out which pages are more important.

Quick tip: You can also implement a sitemap that matches the structure of your website. Google doesn’t always follow it, but it can be helpful for very big sites.

2. Boilerplate Content vs. Unique Content

Boilerplate content is content that is or can be repeated on multiple pages of your website. It’s usually split into 3 categories: header, footer, and sidebars.

Unique content is basically the actual content of a page. It’s what lies between the header, footer, and sidebars.

3. Internal page performance

As you probably know, the more backlinks a page has, the more valuable it is for that website and also the more value it can pass onward to another page, through a link of its own. This SEO signal is very important for Google and it will be for a long time.

4. Number of Internal Links

As any other SEO strategy, method, or category, things can and will be abused by some. Google penalizes such abuses, including internal links. As long as you keep things relevant, you shouldn’t be pouring in too many links.

5. Use & Risks of Anchor Texts

Anchor texts are the phrases that users see when they click on a hyperlink. As with regular backlinks, anchor texts should use keywords, because they say what that link is about and help pages rank higher for those keywords.

6. Importance of Relevancy

Google has recently put a lot of emphasis on user experience. So, please just don’t fill up your pages with useless links, just for the sake of having them.

7. Dofollow & Nofollow

When you interlink between your pages, you want to ensure those links are dofollow. A dofollow link is just a regular link, lacking the nofollow tag. A nofollow link tag specifies to the search engines that the equity should not be passed and that the vote doesn’t count anymore.

Step by Step Internal Linking Guide

Considering you now know the basics mentioned above and you won’t use a bad structure or abuse exact match anchors when you interlink, you can start an internal linking strategy on your own website.

Step 1. Mapping Everything

If you haven’t done this on a regular basis before, you really need to plan it out, especially if you have a big website.

Step 2. Keyword Research

You can use tools like cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Explorer or Google’s Keyword Planner to help with keyword ideas.

Step 3. Searching Your Website

It’s now time to use those keywords to find relevant, older articles that we can link to our most recent articles.

Step 4. Interlink from & to New Pages

Every time you post something new, link to other older articles that are relevant to the topic.

Step 5. Fetch and Render

After each internal linking session, remember to send your pages for crawling. This will tell Google to take another look at your pages, so it can see the modifications you’ve made and better understand your website.

Conclusion

Measuring the results is the final step of correctly implementing an internal linking strategy. You can’t say anything really works until you’ve measured its results.