7 Internal Linking Best Practices to Optimize Your SEO

Internal linking is a strategy that you can use to build an interrelated hierarchy on your website. This linking is considered by Google as a key factor for determining search rank. That’s why as you have a business website, it is important to know and understand internal linking best practices.

Internal linking is something you can totally control. With that being said, you have complete power to guide both search engines and your website visitor to the page you want to show, such as product or services pages, your top pages, or even other pages that have the potential to increase sales!

If you are curious to learn more about internal linking and get some tips on internal linking best practices, check out the article below!

What Is Internal Linking?

In brief, internal linking is a practice that uses hyperlinks to connect one to another page on the same website. An internal linking strategy is used to make it easier for users to navigate and maximize their experiences when accessing your website.

Have you ever read an article about a product or service then click on the link at the end of the article to contact the seller? That's the big picture of internal linking practice.

Internal linking is an important factor you should consider as it helps search engines like Google discover the content on your website. 

Why Do Internal Links Matter for SEO?

If you may want to know the importance of internal linking for SEO. Well, it's started by a bot from Google called Googlebot that crawls websites by following internal and external links. From here, Google can determine the relationship between content, different pages, and other website contributions by following internal links.

Typically, websites have a complex structure and may have orphaned pages (pages that have no links). This is very detrimental to your SEO performance because Google will find it difficult to index the pages on your site.

Internal links can solve this problem by creating an organized structure on your website called sitemaps. To make it simple, sitemaps are like maps that can help direct Google to find your destination page efficiently.

Types of Internal Links

Before you start building internal links, you should first understand what types of internal links there are. Generally, there are four main types of internal linking, such as:

1. Navigational Links

The first type of website internal linking is navigational links. Sometimes you will find in the top section of the website there is an option menu that directs to several parts of the website such as home, our services, contact us, etc., those are navigational links.

Navigational links are permanent links in the main menu of your website that make it easier for users to find what they want.

2. Footer Links

Next, footer links are part of the navigation links that appear at the bottom of the page on every page of your website. These types of internal links lead to other pages such as to further explore your website or redirect to related content.

3. Sidebar Links

Similar to footers, sidebar links are a type of navigation link used to direct users to related content, these links are usually located on the side of the content page.

4. Contextual Links

Next, contextual links are a type of internal linking that is in the body of the content commonly called in-text links. These links are placed in the anchor text to direct readers to related content and also help Google understand the relevance of other content.

Internal Linking Best Practices

Excellent internal linking is needed to maximize your website's SEO performance. Here are internal linking best practices you can implement to boost your search engine rankings.

1. Identify Pillar Pages on Your Website

You can start the SEO internal linking strategy by identifying your pillar pages. In this context, pillar pages are the main pages that relate to more specific content on your website or you can say it as a container that holds cluster pages.

In pillar pages, you can create topic clusters about groups of content with specific topics. The existence of pillar pages on your website will build a strong linking architecture.

2. Create a Cluster for Each Topic

Next, once you have identified the pillar pages, you can start creating page clusters with related special topics. To put it simply, pillar pages are the main topic of discussion and clusters are supporting content that complements the topic.

For example, if you create pillar pages about marketing then the clusters might contain “What is marketing?” and “Marketing strategies that work”. You can also create clusters within clusters to go into much more detail about the chosen topic. 

These clusters and pillar pages will form an internal link-building structure that is organized and related to each other.

3. Build Anchor Text

The next SEO linking strategy is building anchor text. Anchor text is text in content that can be clicked and directs readers to pages that discuss related phrases that are anchored.

Sometimes when reading content there are terms that you may not be familiar with, this anchor text can direct you to a page explaining the term like a dictionary.

Anchor text can certainly help search engines understand your content better. But also note that you should avoid using anchor text excessively because it is possible to be detected as keyword stuffing.

4. Avoid Using the Same Anchor Text

Besides the excessive use of anchor text, using the same anchor text can also have a negative impact on your SEO performance. 

You should avoid using the same anchor text either on the same page or on different pages. Instead, you can find and use other anchor texts that are still relevant and similar.

5. Identify Site’s Authority Pages

Authority pages on your website are pages that have many high-quality backlinks from external parties. Google considers backlinks as a form of support for your pages and considers your pages as quality content.

Therefore, you need to identify authority pages on your website and then try to link other content to these authority pages, this will help increase Google's trust in your content and improve your SEO performance.

6. Support Your New Pages with Internal Links

The next step in internal linking best practices is supporting your new pages with internal linking. If your new pages don't have authoritative backlinks yet, then building internal links will be very important.

7. Regularly Audit Your Internal Links

The last step is to audit your links regularly. Audit activities are very important to ensure that your internal linking is running properly.

Sometimes, problems or damage to linking may occur over time, which can reduce your SEO performance. So, you need to do audits regularly and immediately make repairs if issues occur.

Conclusion

Internal links must be built properly on every website to help search engines understand the website structure and pages contained on your website more easily. In addition, with internal links, you can also improve the overall user experience which accordingly encourages customer satisfaction.

If you're looking for a helping hand to create strong internal links or need a little extra professional support on technical SEO, you can rely on SEO Services by cmlabs. 

Our professional and experienced team at cmlabs can help you build strong internal links to maximize your website for top Google rankings! So, contact our marketing team and partner with our SEO experts today!