Internal Linking is crucial for SEO. A balanced on-page optimization should include creating relevant internal links for your pages and blog posts for better SEO rankings.
But how do you go about creating those internal links? Surely, it’s more than just randomly stumbling upon keywords and phrases on your pages & linking them to other pages without any thoughts or a clear target.
This type of stray link-building shows a clear lack of an internal link-building strategy.
Internal link can give your content that extra bit of rocket fuel that helps it propel into the top of Google search rankings, but only if it’s done correctly.
Here, we have curated a list of best practices for internal linking that helps you create internal links with a clear aim to rank your target pages higher instead of just building random links & praying to Google for that top ranking.
What Is An Internal Link?
Internal links are essentially bridges to another destination.
The idea of contextual internal links is to help the audience of your website or blog to find more information about a topic, the page you are linking to should be a sub topic of your current page.
Hence, you should only hyperlink to pages that add more value to your topic and not just add internal links for the sake of it.
The bridge should take you to a different destination but that’s related to your original location, it only retains relevance if the destination is related to the origin.
Why Are Internal Links Important For SEO
SEO used to be all about the backlinks, adding some valuable backlinks used to give the deceased results. Today’s SEO is a far cry from it.
But, the backlinks still carry the most value. Content is the king, but there’s still a kingmaker.
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You can still get that vote of confidence from valuable websites and rank very well. Although you have to look for links from your niche and other criteria, SEO experts will come up with links that still work.
Internal links have the same principle, if you have a page that’s ranking well on Google, getting regular traffic or has a lot of good quality links from those pages can help you rank other pages on your website.
You need to make sure the internally linked pages are relevant to each other.
How Many Types Of Internal Links Are There?
Internal links can be divided into different types,
- Navigational Links
- Menu Links
- Header Links
- Footer Links
- Sidebar Links
- Pagination Link
- Breadcrumb Links
- Contextual Links
- Image links
- Call to Action Links.
As you can see above there are many types of internal links, most of the internal links types are navigational and are a part of website structure, that’s all the links you see under navigational links.
While the call-to-action links are used to improve conversions, for the purposes of SEO, we would only discuss the contextual links.
Creating proper semantic context can help you improve the SEO of your website.
Dofollo helps you create those powerful internal links to boost ranking of the year target page.
Although finding semantic internal link opportunities and adding those internal links to your web pages is a lot easier with Dofollo, here are the internal linking best practices you can follow to create the same high-quality internal links for your website.
Internal Link Best Practices.
Choosing Your Target Page.
The First step is to choose the page you wish to rank for. This is probably the easiest as most of you probably already have the page in mind. But here are a few things you should keep in mind when showing the target page.
- The Page should be relevant to the central theme of your website. If you do not have pages that are relevant to your target page, you will not have any pages to link from.
- The keywords or phrases you are trying to rank for should be within means; do not go for keywords that are very hard to rank for.
Discover High Authority Page To Build Internal Links.
To rank higher, you need links from valuable pages. One way to find valuable pages is to find high-authority pages that are also semantically close to your target page.
You can use tools like Ahref and SEMRush to find pages with the most backlinks, but for the purpose of this demonstration, we would use the Google Search Console Tool as the tool of our choice to find pages with the most backlinks.
How To Find High Authority Pages on Google Search Console Tool?
On your Google Search Console, locate the “Links” option on the left-hand menu. This would show you both the internal link & external links.
Under internal links, you will find the “Top linked pages externally” Click on the “more” option under the initial list.
This would open the list of pages with their number of backlinks mentioned on the right.
You also have the option to export the report, from there you can find the pages that are relevant to your target page & sort them according to their number of backlinks if your donor list is sizable.
Build Internal Links on Pages With Organic Traffic
Another way to find a list of your prospective donor pages for your internal links is to find pages on your website that already have some organic traffic to it.
Pages with organic traffic are great indicators of value. If Google is ranking your page high enough to get organic clicks it is assigning the age some authority.
You can not only distribute that page authority to semantically related pages on your website, but internal links on pages with organic traffic also divert real users to your target pages.
This flow of real visitors is a strong ranking signal for Google’s search ranking algorithm.
How To Find Pages With Organic Traffic on Google Search Console Tool?
Ensure The Semantic Relation Between Pages
Once you have the list of prospect keywords ready, you need to open them on your browser one by one and make sure the topic of your target page is really relevant to the donor page.
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It’s even better if the main topic of your target page is more like a subtopic of the donor page.
Assuring the relevance of your pages are crucial when building internal links.
What Are Semantic Relevance?
Saying two pieces of content share semantic relevance means these two pieces of content are closely related in terms of their topic coverage.
For example, a blog post related to on-page SEO would be semantically related to an internal link-building blog post like this one.
Use Descriptive Anchor Text For Internal Links
While Selecting anchor text for your internal links, try to choose descriptive anchor text. Ideall,y your anchor texts should describe the content of your target page.
This linking style helps both search engines and your audience understand the context of your target page, which is great for your user experience.
Avoid building internal links with just one of two words as their anchor text.
Choose A Contrasting Hyperlink Text Color
Building internal links is not just for SEO ranking; it also helps your users to find valuable information on your website.
Make sure your internal link stands out from the regular text well enough so your audience can visually distinguish them while scanning the webpage, even on a mobile device.
A good practice is to make the color of your hyperlink to the main theme color of your website, here are some great examples of this.
This contrast of your hyperlinks looks great, and they improve the click-through rate of your internal links.
Limit The Number Of Link In A Page
Internal links are great for improving the ranking of your pages, but they should be built in moderation.
You wouldn’t want to build too many of them as that would dilute their link juice, having too many links from a page would reduce the average influence of each internal link from that Page.
How Many Internal Links Is Too Many?
But how many is too many? Well, for internal links, most SEO experts recommend sticking below internal links per to words. But, most bigger well-known blogs usually build more internal links, especially on older blog posts.
If you are not sure what limit you should set for yourself, you can use Dofollo to check the behemoths, your competitors or the page ranking at the top of Google search and see how many internal links they are adding to their blogs.
Avoid No-follow Links
Conventional wisdom is, Do-follow links pass link juice as well as navigating the user while No-follow links do not pass the link authority, they are used for navigational purposes.
While, If No-Follow has zero link authority or lower link authority could be up for debate, it is best to avoid the no-follow when building internal links.
How to build dofollow links?
All links that you create through the WordPress editor are dofollow by default unless you add the nofollow tag.
Nofollow links have specified it by adding a “nofollow” tag.
Add External Links
Links help your pages to rank, but it’s not just limited to backlinks and internal links.
External links, too, can help you rank your pages. This might seem counterintuitive but a meaningful external link that elevates user experience does help you rank higher.
But what kind of external links should you build? Links to pages that would provide valuable information to your audience, relevance and usefulness are the key here.
How many external links should your page have?
Unless you have a listicle on your webpage, it is advisable to have only one or two external links.
A good practice is to make external links that open in new tabs instead of closing your own website and redirecting your audience there, as this would reduce your dwell time.
Also, external links should ideally not be at the beginning of the page.
What Are External Links?
External links are links on your page that divert your visitors to a different page outside your own website.
Add Internal Links To Newly Published Pages and Blog Posts.
When you publish a page or a blog post, it is usually with the intent of generating organic traffic.
Creating internal links immediately after publishing a new page helps Google and other search engines discover your page sooner and it helps you rank as well.
Using Dofollo makes the process easier, just entering the URL of your newly published page would allow you to see a list of internal linking opportunities in seconds using Dofollo’s Artificial intelligence.
You can also place the internal link from Dofollo console, within seconds your newly published blog would have internal links from relevant and high authority pages to help it click the ranking ladder.
Run An Internal Link Audit At Regular Intervals
Internal linking is crucial to SEO for its cost and time benefit. Similar to SEO, building and managing internal links is an ongoing process.
You would need to audit internal links of your website on a regular interval to make sure your internal link game is at par with other SEO efforts and to make sure you are fully utilizing your internal linking opportunities.
Creating new links and deleting unnecessary links that do not align with your business or revenue goal anymore are all part of it.
Apart from these auditing your internal link also allows you to do the following.
Fix Broken Links
If you are managing bigger websites or managing a plethora of websites, finding those broken links might become a painful task. This is especially true if you are running an agency and your client’s website has been managed by other agencies and freelancers in the past.
Finding those broken links and fixing them might resolve a lot of SEO-related issues on your website.
But you need a reliable tool to find those broken pages. Maybe you have access to those tools, too, but replacing them is a very time-consuming task. You can now make it smooth and fast with Dofollo.
Dofollo would not only show the broken links to you but also help you replace or remove them.
Fix Orphan Pages
Orphan pages are not good for SEO; they hurt your SEO. They usually never rank for organic keywords, and having them on your website doesn’t make a lot of sense. But it might not always be possible to get rid of those pages.
Dofollo allows you to find those orphan pages and link them to other pages on your website that are contextually similar.
Eliminating the orphan pages would help your website in the long run.
I have mentioned the best practices here, and this list would certainly help you improve your on page SEO, but I kept the most important of them for the end.
Start Building Internal Links Now.
Knowledge is power only when you apply your knowledge. These best practices would only make sense when you start implementing them on your website or the websites you manage.
Manage Your Internal Links
with AI for Better SEO Rankings
Results for the SEO optimization can take a long time to reflect but they would reflect only when you start taking action and implementing the changes you learnt today.
Sign up for a trail of Dofollo now and start building your internal links. There’s never a better time than now.
