How to link internally to boost your SEO

Internal linking matters much more than you think for SEO!

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Enhancing search engine optimization for your brand is important. Part of that optimization process requires you to have a strong brand presence on social media, in person, and of course, on the internet. 

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If your brand already has a website, you’ve got your foot in the door. If you are practicing basic SEO techniques, you’re practically there. You might be building long-form content or using dynamic keywords, but there is one SEO-boosting strategy that most marketers don’t spend enough time on. And that’s internal linking. 

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Internal linking is the process of embedding a link to a page in your website within another page on the same website. It’s quite a simple process and is very easy to implement. 

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And that’s exactly why most marketers don’t spend enough time on internal linking to boost their search engine optimization. 

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However, if you do take the time to follow a few best practices when it comes to structuring your internal linking, you can help increase traffic to your website and spread the word about your brand with just a few well-placed clicks. 

Why is internal linking important? 

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When a search engine such as Google, Bing, or Firefox is sifting through millions of different websites to present to an internet user, they need some way of ranking them to know which ones they should show. Search engine platforms are able to find your website when it has links that connect it to other content on the internet.

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The same goes for internal linking. 

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If you include links to other pages on your website in your content, those links can help the search engine get an idea of what your website is, what it’s trying to do, and how it might be able to answer the needs of the user. 

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Internal linking can also let you show off what is most important in your website’s content so that users can click through to the relevant information they need as quickly as possible. 

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To optimize internal linking, there are a few things you need to know. 

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1. Think about the structure of your website 

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When you have a website with user-friendly pages, you’ll likely have an easier time getting visitors beyond the homepage of your site. 

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But if you’re looking at your website’s analytics and noticing that users aren’t frequently on a certain page, or are frequenting a specific page, that’s fantastic information for you to have in your back pocket. 

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If users are not clicking on a specific page of your site, dive a bit deeper to figure out why. Maybe your keyword phrases aren’t doing the work they are supposed to, or perhaps it doesn’t have enough external links. 

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If the page does have a high visitor rate, try to link this page in your internal links more often. You don’t want to take away opportunities for your other pages to do well, but it’s important that you highlight what is working for you. 

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If you link to pages that do well on your site, you’ll help engage your user base more efficiently. 

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And as for those pages that aren’t doing so hot? See what you can do to tweak their content so that it can be better utilized for internal linking purposes. 

2. Clean up your anchor links

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Anchor links are the words you can select to take you to a different link. In other words, anchor links are the clickable blue text you see in a hyperlink. 

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Internal linking obviously cannot be done if there are no clickable hyperlinks within the text of a webpage. But how do you optimize this type of text to boost your SEO?

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Anchor links help the user bounce between pages on your website, but they also help different search engines such as Google understand the type of content you’re producing. 

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If you link out to content that isn’t related, is from a content farm, or is just generally of poor quality, your rankings on a platform like Google will be lower. 

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Remember, the old days of SEO are over. 

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Marketers can’t simply throw a bunch of keywords into their text and pump out content like they used to. SEO is geared heavily toward the user experience, and as such, search engines like Google want to make sure that their customers will be happy with the results provided for them. 

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Take a turn around your website and spend some time cleaning up your anchor links. You’ll be doing yourself a favor by removing all those pesky, unrelated links and instead linking to relevant internal content. Focus on that, and you’ll be one step closer to getting better analytic results for your website. 

3. Create lots of quality content 

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While creating quality content should be your go-to for your website, it’s especially important for optimizing your SEO.

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As mentioned previously, search engine giants like Google prefer good content. That means they like content to be informative to users, unique, and interesting. 

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One of the easiest and best ways to accomplish this is through using semantic SEO strategies. 

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This type of SEO-boosting method prompts creators to give the user all possible information they might need to know. Creators will attempt to answer any and all questions that a user might have within one long, SEO-friendly post. This helps creators: 

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1. Keep users on their websites for longer amounts of time 
2. Generate content that will encompass many different subject areas within one topic so that the content can be as helpful as it possibly can 

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When you begin using semantic SEO strategies in your content creation, the quality of your posts will skyrocket. This in turn should leave you with more exceptional internal content with which to link to. And the more great content you have to offer will likely drive the traffic you desire with it. 

4. Widen the range of your internal linking 

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It might be tempting to throw in internal links that will take users from the homepage to the contact page of your website. However, you should do your best to avoid this type of internal linking. 

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One of the purposes of internal linking is to help users narrow in on what they need — whether that’s a question, a future purchase, or something else entirely. 

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Your internal linking should help them achieve those goals, meaning, it should go deep. 

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If your internal linking is only staying surface level (if you were to link from the contact page back to the homepage, for example), users will leave your website fast. 

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Linking to the primary pages on your site such as the homepage or the contact page doesn’t give users any unique or interesting information that they can’t easily access themselves. 

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Link to pages that are specific and go beyond the homepage of your website. You’ll have better luck getting and keeping users. 

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Internal linking is relatively simple, but it does require a bit of thought to execute effectively. If you implement these methods when working on your internal linking strategies, you’ll be well on your way to bigger and better content. 

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