Jumpstart Your SEO with These 5 Internal Linking Strategies
To boost your SEO and content marketing efforts, you need to practice strategic internal linking. Apply internal linking regularly as you publish blogs and articles and update your web pages.
Internal links join web pages within one website with the same source and target domain. The goal behind internal linking is to assist in the website navigation, to illustrate the website and hierarchy of a website and to share page authority and ranking power throughout the website.
Internal linking boosts the general search-optimize value of a website by creating clear paths for spiders, lengthened user sessions and close-knit chain of pages and posts.
You can jumpstart your SEO with these five internal linking strategies:
1. Produce plenty of content
You need to have lots of internal pages to build numerous internal links.
Creating plenty of content result in a good amount of linkable content. In short, the more links to the more places on your website, the more efficient your internal linking strategy will be.
2. Use anchor text
Anchor text refers to clickable text in the hyperlink and your internal links should use them.
Using image links is okay, as long as the images are not the primary source of main links and images are correctly alt-tagged.
Opt for natural and unoptimized sentence fragments as your anchor text, highlight and link them.
3. Practice Deep Linking
Refrain from using links to the top level pages of your website – these are pages to the main navigation menu which already has links.
The best links are deep within the structure of the site, so this is important to remember for your internal linking strategies. The more deep links you have, the better.
4. Employ ‘natural’ links that appeal to readers
One of the most important goals of a content link is to provide value to the reader. One of the main advantages of internal linking is to enhance user engagement on your website.
When your users see a useful link that legitimately matches the context of your content, they are more inclined to click on that link. It can be an internal or external link, as long as it’s something that interests the users.
However, if it is an internal link, the site visitor stays longer and becomes more engaged in your web experience.
Content links transmit a strong signal to the user and the search engine that you are linking quality content.
5. Use relevant links
Another thing to remember is to link content that is relevant to the source text. Link to relevant content in your internal linking as much as possible.