An appropriate internal linking strategy can definitely boost your SEO in an effective way and help attain top ranks on search engines. Let us check out some internal linking best practices. It gives an idea to Google about how your website is structured. It provides a hierarchy by giving more importance to the most relevant pages. Internal links are important to connect one page of your website to another. It will help the users easily locate the required content on your website through effortless navigation.
What Are Internal Links?
Internal and external linking strategies are crucial for every website. Internal links connect content located in different areas within your website while external links go out of your website. Both search engines and users need links to sail through your website. There are different types of internal links such as navigator, footer, and contextual links.
Different Types of Internal Links
- Navigator links: These appear on the header menu with proper HTML formatting. For example, the About Us page or a landing page with a call-to-action.
- Footer links: Also known as boilerplate links, these appear on every page of a website.
- Contextual links: These help to get better internal links pointing to related articles and topics.
10 Best Ways to Build Effective Internal Links for SEO
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- Add lots of content: You need to write more quality content to add links on your pages. If your content is not good enough, you cannot add more links to redirect the readers to other pages on your website. When you have lots of content, it improves your linkable content, which is a good internal linking strategy for SEO.
- You can use anchor text: Anchor text takes you to another page of the website. It gives an idea to the search engine and your users about the content you are linking. Relevant anchor text helps your page attain top ranks on search engines.
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- Use deep links: Rather than redirecting to the Home page or About Us page, deep links direct to pages with specific content. It improves the reader’s experience by giving more relevant content.
- Add links that are relevant and natural: As SEO internal linking strategy requires a user-friendly approach, it is important to add links that are relevant and natural. This promotes user engagement and persuades the visitors to stay longer on your site.
- Links must be contextual: The links must have some connection with the main content. It needs to include content that readers find useful. You cannot add links talking about something that has no connection with the main topic.
- Add a limited number of internal links: There is no need to stuff your internal content with too many links. As per the direction of Google, you just need to add a reasonable number of internal links. According to the length of your content, you can add three or a maximum of four links.
- You can use follow links: Giving proper follow links can help you to boost your SEO ranking. It is a critical factor that is responsible for the overall performance of your page.
- Put links on the top: Even though you can add links anywhere in your content, it is always good if you can add them at the beginning of your web page. It helps readers find related information on your webpage that retains their attention for a long time.
- Avoid internal link automation: Automation creates exact same anchor texts for multiple pages and due to this your webpage might get listed as spam.
- Check and correct broken internal links: you can use a broken link checker like Screaming Frog to check whether there are broken internal links that can badly affect your webpage. This helps find bugs on your website.
Common Issues with Internal Links
- Broken internal links that are not ideal for communicating with authority
- Links cannot be crawled when the format of the URL is incorrect
- Orphaned sitemap pages cannot be accessed or indexed
- Pages with single internal links can miss opportunities in SEO
- Permanent redirects might reduce the crawl budget
How Many Internal Links Should a Page Have?
The maximum number of links for your websites or pages on your websites that bring back your content should be around 20. Like every other factor that determines the performance of your site, this number can slightly decrease or increase according to the size of your site.
Little corrections can always create big differences in the performance of your web page ranking. According to Google Search Advocate John Mueller, internal linking is “supercritical for SEO.” He says they are one of the most relevant things that help Googlebot and users to recognize the importance of pages within a website. All these techniques can effectively improve your internal link building process and enable your web pages to rank in the topmost position on search engines.
