Doing Internal linking for SEO is one of the best ways to boost your traffic, more pages per session, low bounce rate, increases authority, and a higher duration of sessions.
This everything can be achieved only through internal linking. When everything is achieved, then through internal linking, the SEO score will be increased for your websites.
Table of Contents
What is internal linking in SEO
An internal link is a link from one page of your website to another page of your website. Linking the one-page link to another page within the same domain is called internal linking.
Internal links are different from external links. External links are a link that connects the pages of another website.
Why internal linking important for SEO
The human users and search engines will use the links to navigate to other pages in your site.
Mainly search engines use links to navigate your pages.
And also internal links help search engines like google, to find and understand your pages on that website.
If you use it properly, it boosts your page traffic and SEO ranking. Internal links spread the links equally throughout the site and maintain the ranking power.
How internal linking works with google?
By using the google bots, google crawls your website. These bot reaches one page, and reach all other pages in your site through links, to find out the similar contents.
What is anchor text?
Anchor text is a clickable text in a hyperlink, highlighted and linked with other page links. Anchor text navigates us to reach other pages by clicking it.
How the anchor text look like?
Look at the below screenshot from my older post
In the image, the highlighted words are the anchor text. That highlighted text is attached with a link to the other page.
The text, which attached to some other page through links is called anchor text.
this article is also part of an
- writing SEO friendly content
- create SEO friendly URLs
- internal linking for SEO
Best Strategies for Internal Linking Online
Use anchor text with rich keywords
The anchor text is the Best Strategies for Internal Linking Online. Focus on your anchor text by targeting rich keywords.
Google also recommends you use your main keywords in the anchor text when internal linking for SEO.
The anchor text is not only helpful for external links. Anchor also helps google to easily navigate other pages in your site.
For example, take an internal link from my website,
In the above, the blogging checklist is the anchored text.
Google and human users easily find that the linked page is about blogging checklist. And also, I have used only the keywords in the anchor text (blogging checklist)
Probably won’t use the same anchor text repeatedly for the same page link. Google says using exact anchor text repeatedly in internal links won’t typically affect you.
But do be a safer side, change your anchor text slightly for using the same internal link in other pages.
For example, see the same internal link but different anchor text.
Again I have used the same internal link, but slightly different anchor text. It also focused on the keyword. This is the you have to use your anchor text.
Avoid using same anchor text for different pages
Using the same anchor text for two different pages should be avoided.
For example – take two different pages with slightly different title
In this type of internal linking, you wouldn’t use the same anchor text for both pages. It confuses the search engines.
Instead use the correct anchor text, that resembles the particular page.
Place links in initial lines of your pages
Placing the internal links at the top of your pages will decrease your bounce rate. It improves your dwell time.
In recent days, the google algorithm has updated a lot. Google considers nearly 200 factors for ranking your pages at the top of search engines.
Dwell time is also one of the factors that Google considers for ranking your site.
If users spend more time in your pages, it says google that your page has some quality information, and people interested in reading your content.
This will rank higher for targeted keywords.
When you place internal links at the top of the page, for some needs users will click it. By clicking the internal links, the users will navigate to other pages in your domain.
It tends the users to spend more time on your site.
Don’t dump more internal links in initial lines. Try to have only 1 to 2 internal links in the initial lines.
Two types of links used in linking
- Dofollow links
- Nofollow links
Do follow links
A Dofollow link is a link that is in its default state. Any link that is without a nofollow attribute is a dofollow link.
How to make do-follow links
Initially, all the links are do-follow links.
For example, if you are creating the new blog post, by default your new blog post will be the dofollow link.
For example – the above link in the URL of this blog post is a dofollow link.
When to use do-follow links
Always, for internal linking, you should use do-follow links. Only dofollow links can spread the page rank from one to another.
Through dofollow links only search engine bots will crawl your pages. So use only dofollow links only for internal linking.
Nofollow links
Nofollow links are a link that contains rel=”nofollow” HTML tag. Search engine bots do not take the nofollow links into the considerations.
This nofollow tag is the only technical difference between the nofollow link and dofollow link.
How to make nofollow links
Normal dofollow link will look like
By adding rel=”nofollow” at the end of the tag, the nofollow link can be made.
When to use nofollow link
It is used when you are linking to low authority websites for sponsored posts. It is initially introduced to avoid spammers. Usually, links in your comments are nofollow links.
If you use WordPress, then this WordPress plugins allows you to manage nofollow links.
Internal links help to faster indexing
Sometimes if you have lots of pages, google will index important pages in your site.
In this situation, the internal linking plays a major role.
Internal linking will make it easier for Google to index it.
Point high authority pages with low authority pages, so that authority can be shared.
Link from your homepages
Most of the time, homepages will be the more authoritative page in all websites.
So try to build, link strategically from the home page.
You can see that on many websites, their homepage contains lost of newly published blogs and popular blogs. Through this, only you can build your link juice.
Eliminate internal linking automation plugins
Avoid using automatic internal linking plugins.
Some think that all the plugins and blogging tools will help to increase your quality. But it is not at all the time. Choose your plugins carefully.
Reasons to avoid plugins
- Repeating the anchor text – it creates the internal links for the same anchor text repeatedly.
- Less understanding – it doesn’t understand the page and creating only links to anchor text.
- Less interaction – it doesn’t know what are the related articles to this, to be linked. Without linking the proper articles, human interaction will be reduced, and it leads to a bounce rate.
So, spend 5 minutes with your posts for interlinking.
Strategically build your architecture
Normally, one page will connect other page. More than that, link all the related pages in that category.
For example – if you have 10 pages under the same category, then try to connect them to everyone from a single source.
Image – category
For example – e-commerce sites will do it better. They have all the products under their category.
From the category, you can access all their products and the category is linked to the homepage.
This is how you want to build to internal link strategically.
Internal linking to your old post
Spend your little in adding a new post link to your older posts.
You don’t need to spend your time often, whenever you publishing a new post.
But once in a month or at a regular interval, take your older posts and update the newly published post link, wherever it needed.
If you have extra time, when updating the internal link, parallelly update your post by adding new content.
When updating your content, mention in your first paragraph that it was an updated content.
Don’t overlink for seo
Doing an internal link is good for the SEO point of view.
But how much link needs to link in a blog post.
Don’t do overlinking. Your internal link on a page could be below 100 (recommended).
Going above than 100 links on a page is not a bad idea. Some longer articles will have over 200 internal links.
But over 100 links, the value of the links will start reducing.
First link matters
If you are linking the same page with different anchor text in an article, what will happen?
This is not a different thing.
We everyone did that. The longer article will have two internal links on one page for reference.
Will google consider both the anchor text of the two identical links.
No, Google will consider only the first anchor text in the post.
So, that’s why the placement of your anchor text is important.
from the start of the blog, try to build your internal link perfectly.
Final checklist for internal linking SEO
- Use anchor text with rich keywords
- avoid using the same anchor text for different pages
- Place links in initial lines of your pages
- Two types of links used in linking (dofollow, nofollow)
- Link from your homepages
- Internal links help to faster indexing
- Eliminate internal linking automation plugins
- First link matters
Conclusion
Concluding that, with a lot of things to do improve SEO, still the internal linking is one of the easiest ways to do. Add the internal linking to the checklists, so don’t forget.
By doing internal linking for SEO through the above methods, your search engine ranking will be improved. These strategies, will improve your SEO ranks and reduces your bounce rate.
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If you know any best strategies for internal linking your blog post for SEO, then comment below so that other readers also know it.
