8 Internal Linking Best Practices to Improve Your Website SEO

Backlinks remain one of the most important ranking factors in Google. However, you shouldn’t just think about how you can get more backlinks from other websites.

You should also think about how to manage the internal links you have on your website.

Internal links are the links that connect one page to another page on the same website. We usually use them mainly to make our visitors navigate our website much easier. However, in SEO, internal links can also be important as they can tell search engines about the relative importance of our website pages.

Thus, to optimize our SEO results, we should ensure that we have an excellent internal linking strategy for our website.

But, how do we have an excellent internal linking strategy? Here are 8 internal linking best practices you might want to consider implementing to help with that.

1. Create In-Depth Content for More Internal Linking Opportunities

The more content length that we have, the more opportunities we have to place internal links in our website pages.

This is just logical. Thus, we should ensure that we create content as comprehensively as possible if we want to have more internal links.

As a bonus, long-form content also seems to do better in Google according to the research from Backlinko. Therefore, we should be able to get an additional positive impact on our website by creating this kind of content.

To create comprehensive content, try to discuss as many useful things as possible related to your targeted keyword.

You can add subtopics from the long-tail variants of that keyword or benchmark from competitors’ content as well.

By doing those things, you should be able to make your content more comprehensive. You can also add more internal links to the content part where you think they will be useful for your visitors.

2. Use Optimum Anchor Text if Possible

If it is possible and makes sense, you should use specific anchor text on your internal links. That specific anchor text is the target keyword of the content you refer to with your links.

For example, let’s say you published content about how to cook spaghetti on your website. You want to refer to it from your other content through an internal link.

Instead of making this kind of link.

You should make this kind of link instead.

Doing that should help the referred content to rank better as the anchor text informs Google about the content main theme.

Furthermore, using specific anchor text should help your visitors to understand what is in the referred content better.

One of the internal link advantages is you have full control over how you create the links, unlike external links. Thus, as long as it still makes sense, you should create them according to what benefits you the most.

3. Remember to Make Internal Links Dofollow

To our website visitors (unless they are SEO practitioners), dofollow internal links don’t have much difference compared to nofollow links.

After all, their appearance looks similar on a website page.

However, dofollow internal links and nofollow internal links can make much difference for our SEO results.

Dofollow links are more valuable than nofollow links as they pass link juice to the targeted page.  Therefore, you should remember to make your internal links dofollow. That is if you want to get a more positive SEO impact from them.

It can be easy to forget this, especially if you usually set the links on your website to nofollow automatically. Thus, you may want to check again your content before you publish it on your website. Make sure you set its internal links to dofollow so you don’t miss any SEO benefit from them.

4. Publish Content Related to Your Prioritized Content

Have content you want to prioritize to rank in the search engine?

This content is probably related to your business offering or something that targets a buying keyword.

What should you do in terms of internal links to help you rank that kind of content?

The first thing you can do is identify the internal link opportunities for it from your existing content.

Besides that, you can also create and publish special content with a target keyword related to the prioritized content.

The target keyword can be the long-tail versions of the keyword you target for the prioritized content. It can also be a keyword in the same, specific niche. If your prioritized content targets a buying keyword, then you can target informational keywords related to it.

What is important is it is related so it can be much easier to create natural internal links that connect your content.

Besides the link juice advantage, if the related content gets traffic, you can also grow the traffic for your prioritized content. That is because the content between the two of them is related and linked through your internal link.

This can give benefits in terms of potential backlinks as well. If your visitor is a website owner and interested in the prioritized content, she or he might link it from her or his content.

You can optimize your SEO results further because of that.

5. Link Prioritized Content from the Homepage

As you build backlinks to your website, many of the backlinks you get most probably target your homepage.

Why does that happen?

If a website mentions your website in general, the most suitable place to link to your website is usually your homepage.

Moreover, if you contribute a guest post, then you are probably only allowed to get a link to your homepage.

Thus, as it usually gets the most backlinks, the homepage usually has the most authority compared to other pages. This makes its internal links more valuable compared to any other page’s internal links.

Thus, if you have a page you prioritize to rank, it should get an internal link from your homepage.

Doing that should help it perform better in the search results of the keyword it targets. Besides, people who visit your website through your homepage will be able to access the prioritized page directly from there.

However, the link placement should still make sense so it doesn’t confuse your visitors. You shouldn’t link too many pages from your homepage as well as that practice can confuse Google.

6. Try to Boost Your Hub Pages Authority

Hub pages are pages that act as the connector to many contents on your website. They can be category pages, tag pages, or pillar contents that link to many other related contents.

Internal links seem to have more power when they come from pages with high authority. Thus, it should be great for your website SEO if your hub pages are authoritative.

To improve their authority, you can try to add more content to your hub pages so they can be more useful for people. This should make it more attractive for other websites to give a link to it. You can also try to promote it to other websites by doing some outreach.

The objective here is to get more backlinks to your hub pages so you can improve their authority. By doing that, you should be able to strengthen their internal links power and also improve your SEO results.

7. Create a “Read Also” Section

You may often see this kind of section on the content of many websites.

This “Read Also” section can help you boost your website engagement by making people read more of your content. Additionally, it can also be the place where you put your internal links.

Looking at these advantages, if it is plausible, you should create this section on your content page if you haven’t. It is usually positioned at the bottom of the content so people can read your other content after finishing the one they originally read.

Add links to content you think can be interesting for your readers and related to the content of the current page. By doing that, you should be able to optimize the engagement and the internal links’ impact on your website at the same time.

8. Add Internal Links Naturally

Looking at the possible advantages of internal links to your website SEO, you may become tempted to add many internal links on your website pages. However, you shouldn’t force to add them in locations where they don’t make sense from your website visitor’s point of view.

Try to add them naturally in the places where you can help your visitors navigate your website better instead.

Remember, since the introduction of RankBrain, Google has also used user experience as an important ranking factor. Therefore, you shouldn’t do something that can make your visitors have a negative perception of your content. This includes having your content flooded with too many internal links.

Doing that may lower your SEO results instead. You surely don’t want that, right?

To add the right internal links, you can try to reread your content after you finish creating it. See where you can add your internal links naturally and in a helpful way for your visitors.

Doing this should help you place internal links that can help your visitors and your SEO effort.

Conclusion

When trying to optimize the SEO results of your website, internal links are something you want to manage well. They can improve the engagement of your website visitors, thus improving their user experience ass well, and indicate the importance of your website pages to search engines.

Utilize them, especially for the content you prioritize, and add them naturally with the intention of helping your website visitors. Implement each of the best practices in this article as well. That should help you maximize the use of internal links to improve your website SEO results.

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Author Bio

Dan Brunell is a person that has a passion for technology and SEO. He is the founder of Innovation Infinite, a website that discusses all things about technology.