Internal Linking and Search Engine Optimization
Thinking about the importance of creating a good structure for your website, you also want to think about how your visitors browse through pages on your site. Whenever you publish a new post, you are increasing the number of pages that make up your site. Unless you complete a mini “web” of linking to the previous posts, no one will discover them, nor will you be able to decrease your bounce rate.
Let’s assume that you have five hundred posts on your blog, but you haven’t made a point to sequentially add links to previous posts that relate to what you are mentioning in the current post. Visitors interested in what you have written won’t be able to visit these extra posts unless you have added a related posts area to your blog or they explicitly search for those terms.
Your main goal is to make it as easy as possible for them to browse through your content, and this is where internal linking comes into play.
Introduction
Internal linking is more than just linking to previous posts, but increasing your search engine rankings for the posts, keywords, and exposing more of your posts that might not have seen as much traffic.
These are a few of the key benefits of increasing the number of links to internal pages, or pages that you have already created within your site.
- Linking increases traffic to those posts that have been linked to more frequently.
- Combined with traditional keyword targeting, you can link to posts that might be able to increase in rankings. For example, you could create simple posts that explain how to do something, then link back to them in future reference posts.
- Linking makes it easier for visitors to navigate your site.
Best Practices
Even though the main method of linking to other posts is through content, there are several other methods for performing the task in slightly less obvious methods.
Link Posts – Posts that share links with visitors, such as your most popular articles over the past month help provide a resource to your readers, while still encouraging them to visit additional posts.
Footer/Header Links – Placing additional links to your content in “featured” areas can help increase visibility of the articles, as these areas are often most viewed anyway.
Images – When you go about placing images into your content, rather than linking them to other sites (where appropriate), you can link them back to other posts of a similar topic.
Related Posts Widget – Placed in either the sidebar or beneath individual posts, this addition can provide value, in that it increases the chance that people visit additional pages.
Navigation Structure – Including a breadcrumbs or drop-down navigation menu could help you place additional content in these areas, specifically for individual posts.
SEO Methods
An important decision that you have to make is how effective you want internal linking to be. For example, if you want certain posts to rise more in search engines, link to them more often. Otherwise, you should simply be linking back to internal posts whenever possible and with whatever keywords are available.
Using Surrounding Text – This can be important, especially if you are targeting a key phrase, such as “How to Blog”. Ideally, the entire phrase should be used in the link, rather than just one or two words. Many search engines take into consideration these words when generating the quality of the site.
Variation – Don’t stick with one format for linking to internal pages. You want to vary and change the surrounding text and any keywords you are using.
Targeting Keywords – In other examples, it would be better if you left out smaller, filler words that just add length to the link. With this method, you should target sole keywords that stand out to readers who may want to learn more.
Avoid: Using words like “click here” or “link” to inform your readers that they should be clicking on that link isn’t good. You should instead be using the appropriate keywords.
Use Statistics and Tools – Check the ranking of several pages within various search engines and other tools to determine where your posts rank. See if adding extra links throughout posts and the homepage of your site increase the ranking (towards the top of the results) after targeting certain keywords.
Focus on Link Equity – Don’t link out “externally” too often, but keep the number of internal to external links rather equal. Additionally, don’t focus too heavily on a single post, but rather a collection of posts that have been semi-popular.
Conclusion
Remember that internal linking is just another strategy that you have to think about every time you write a new post. Although it does add some time looking through your archives and selecting the right keywords, in the end it will help increase your traffic through higher search engine results for certain keywords and pages.
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Nice Article. I also wrote on the importance of Internal Link Structure of a website few weeks back. Nice to see your thought on it.
Great article, Thanks
Internal linking is a major aspect of onsite SEO. Another important point to add to the above list is to research your traffic generating keywords from Google Analytics and add more of them to internally link to the relevant posts.
Nice post.
Thats a great article indeed.. I use Internal linking to make people visit interesting posts of their choice and with this my bounce rate improved drastically.. A great way i must say..
Thanks for the great tips. I have recently started doing internal linking in my posts and it’s hard work. I also have a related posts plugin installed as well to help my visitors.
I will try adding links to some pictures, I never thought of that.
I have a small doubt regarding internal linking. Does it increases the page rank of the particular posts which we are linking internally????
I don’t no properly whether it helps in PageRank. But I read somewhere that Yes it helps. “You may ask what is the proof? On Google toolbar you can see that internal links are considered as backlinks.”
PageRank is calculated on a page by page basis. So yes you can ‘reuse’ pagerank within your site. It helps search engine rankings. Plus it helps visitors spend more time on your site, which increases the chance of a sale/subscription.
nice post, Internal Links is good think for SEO
and btw, look great for color update
Thanks. Glad you like the new color
Very good article.Thanks
Thankyou for the awesome article. I must add that rotating keywords around is also healthy for SEO
this is a nice post
Interesting thoughts. Internal linking is very important, especially when your website has lots of sub domains.
In our incessant quest to attract links to our websites we very often neglect internal linking, to our detriment. Point well taken, and thanks for the tips.
It is possible but it depends on the content – it is rare to get every single web page indexed but possible.A site map will help by making the search engines aware of all your pages including the ones that have no outside links, But what you really need is to develop back links to those pages so that the search engines will index them. But this post is really nice.
how can we do SEO for videos sites
totally agree with the internal linking kind of SEO strategy, i am running a home based business blog actually, i wasnt aware of the importance of internal linking initially and many of my pages took very long time to be crawled by the SE. After i am trying to link my sub pages from the main page (basically most crawled page), that particular pages(new post) was crawled within 2 days!
Thanks for your great info in this post.
Internal linking and the structure of your various pages can make a huge difference for SEO. The tip about linking pictures to internal pages is a good idea, but I wonder, can you ever have too many internal links? Would SEs look down on this.
I purchased the SEO Elite for my business http://www.scentastic.net, which is a discount fragrance business, and it has not done anything for me so far, so whatever you do DO NOT use that.
I wondered if that program actually did anything.
I finally went with a company called First Page SEO that specializes in search engine optimization and was told the best way to get your page optimized is to pay someone to professionally do it and they were reasonably priced.
Smiley is on to something. It is much easier than it ever was and many times, there are easier ways to get your site up fast if you use various other places online to host your information.
Good article…I am glad that you mentioned internal linking. I don’t think enough people do internal linking, which is truly a shame.
Those people do not do Internal linking which arent aware of this thing.. So many people are new in this SEO works and all..
This SEO stuff is so hard, I am still so dumb in this area:)
i would say SEO kind of knowledge have to be built up from time to time by doing research and experiment, dont ever get caught in some of the scam that promise to get you on top of the SE with ton of competitors and competitive keyword.
Try more and research more, you will find it one day.
Internal links should be to combine all the pages on the site, it helps visitors to better navigate.
Thanks for this article. I must admit this SEO is tricky if you don’t have a clue what you are doing. Can internal links increase general PR of the site/blog?
The related posts widget can help solve this quickly and easily. Another thing tho, you must build up a lot of posts that a relevant.
I love the related posts widget but sometimes it doesn’t relate very well.
Link posts are a great example of something that’s both good for SEO and good for readers.
There is pretty much no downside.
Not only do internal links help rankings but they can help visitors to your website find what they are looking for.
hi Johnny, absolutely true, also this indirectly increase the CTR if you are serving adsense…
It’s a very useful tip and a great idea.And i think this Internal Linking help a lot the page visitors.
You have gave nice description about the internal linking which is very important topic to converse.