Internal Linking Made Easy: Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
If your site is an iron throne, internal links are the swords holding it together. Without a solid internal linking strategy, your site’s structure becomes weak, making it hard to succeed. With AI tools like LinkBoss, you can easily build internal links and connect your pages tightly.
Nevertheless, you need to learn how to optimize internal links for the maximum effect to increase your chances of getting ranked higher.
We’ll make internal links easy by explaining all the tips and strategies for using internal links to the best effect.
What Are Internal Links?
Internal links are hyperlinks that connect different posts of the same website. They help users navigate the website easily and also assist search engine crawlers in understanding the site better.
Types of Internal Links
There are four main types of internal links. Learn about them here:
Navigation Links: Navigation links help you navigate through the website’s main sections. You will find them in menus and headers.
Footer Links: As you’ve guessed; they are found in the website’s footer section. These links offer access to important info like contact details, address, privacy policies, and the about page.
Content Links: These links matter the most and have the highest value in terms of SEO. They are known as “in-text links” and usually embedded within your page content. They usually connect to other relevant articles.
Sidebar Links: These are displayed on the sidebar and usually feature related content, popular content, or recent posts.
How Optimizing Internal Links Help with Search Engines
Optimizing Internal Links has numerous benefits. We’ll explore some here:
Site Crawling and Indexing
Internal links make the life of crawlers easy and help them find your content easily. As a result, pages get indexed faster and are visited for updates more frequently.
Link Equity
With internal links, you can ensure that the link equity is distributed among the pages strategically to rank them as high as possible.
SERP Boost
Using keywords as anchor text, you can help the content rank for these keywords. That’s a very popular method where webmasters use high-potential keywords from Search Console and use them as anchor text to boost the content’s ranking.
Prioritizing the important pages
Webmasters should focus on pages that have the potential to bring the most revenue. Internal links help with that.
When you point internal links to a page, it tells google the page matters. If a page has the most internal links on the site, then Google understands that the page matters the most. That way, you are telling what are the best and most important pages on the website that are most worthy of being ranked.
How To Optimize Internal Links for Your Website
These are my best tips for Optimizing Internal Links to rank higher in the SERP.
Make A Strategy
First, decide what kind of strategy you will use. That will depend on what kind of site you have. If you have a niche website, you can use silos and content clusters. With AI tools like LinkBoss, you can build silos and topic clusters within minutes.
For e-commerce sites with thousands of pages, you may opt for bulk interlinking, as linking them manually will take countless hours. LinkBoss’s Bulk Interlinking feature helps you link hundreds of articles with a single click.
Make A Map of The Contents
Map out the contents so you have an idea about all the contents, which will help you identify opportunities to link.
Identify The Most Important Pages.
Find the important pages you want to rank and then build the linking strategy, centering them so that they get the most links.
Build Silos or Topic Clusters Around The Pillar Pages
To become an authority on a topic, you need to build silos or topical clusters. So, to portray your pillar pages as authoritative, build silos/clusters for them.
Use Descriptive Anchor Text
Avoid generic anchor texts like “learn more” or “click here,” and try to be as descriptive as possible. That will give Google more context and help it understand the content better.
Keep Links Relevant
Always link relevant articles. Irrelevant links can hurt your SEO potential. If you don’t find any relevant posts, create one.
Avoid Overuse of Exact Match Anchor Text
Google is great at picking up context. So, repeatedly using the same anchor text is counterproductive and wastes the potential of using internal links for SEO.
LinkBoss anchor manager shows all the anchors and how many times they have been used. The tools help to easily diversify anchor texts, which can be really helpful for SEO efforts.
Update Contents Regularly
Update old content with building links to newer pages. That has two benefits. First, your pages get updated and get an advantage for content freshness. Second, the newer pages get easily indexed with internal links from already indexed content.
Conclusion
As you can see, with some effort, anyone can build a solid internal linking strategy. And with the help of AI tools, there is no excuse left to have a poor internal linking strategy.
So, get to work and give your website the best chance to bring organic traffic.