Optimized internal linking -
Actively decide which page should be the master page for a given phrase or topic. You also decide that the other pages should NOT rank for that topic.
Link to the cornerstone content when the topic is mentioned elsewhere. For more information: How to associate target entities to web pages. You can also use the popular Google hack to do this.
Wherever you find your keyword mentioned on the site, link that keyword through to the cornerstone page. This is not as straightforward as it sounds. If your keyword is too specific, you may not find all the mentions in a search. Anchor text is the text that the reader sees when looking at the link on the web page.
Avoid this. Try and make sense to humans. If not, then use the whole phrase. Google often understands variations on a theme. It will depend on the context of their use.
Doing so should help Google see that these are similar concepts. Featured Resource: Internal Linking Best Practices. To properly audit your internal links structure, you should breakdown your audit into three main steps:.
To properly optimize an existing internal link structure, you first need to go through potential issues and fix them. Broken links go to non-existent resources, typically a error page. You can get a clear overview of these broken lists by running a crawl of your website using a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
Make sure your links do not cause content duplication. When done inconsistently, they can create duplicate versions of your pages. The best way to handle this issue is to set up the required redirect rules and fix internal links to ensure the consistency of your internal link structure.
Any contextual link embedded in text paragraph should incorporate a meaningful anchor text. Use keywords and synonyms instead. Featured Resource: How to do an internal links audit. If you manage a website having hundreds of editorial pages, you probably have tons of link opportunities sleeping in your content.
Building them out manually will take you days or weeks. Using a plugin to automate internal link building is not a solution, as your links will suffer from exact match anchor texts and lack of context. Do you want to optimize your internal linking? Turn your words into actionable data. Now, if you manage to compute your internal links score using InLinks, you also have a list of available link opportunities.
This list is obtained first by extracting named entities from your pages to build a Topic Map of your website, listing all topics aka entities mentioned in your content.
The second step in identifying your link opportunities is associating your target pages with related entities. If no link has been made, InLinks will show this and build these missing opportunities by selecting the best anchor text on a given page.
More information: How to automate your internal linking. We have collected a list of the most frequently asked questions with answers about internal linking.
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Changes will take effect once you reload the page. The Guide. Internal Linking Guide Internal Linking is a skill that can levitate your site to new heights.
This tool crawls the number of links present on the page and calculates the percentage of link juice that will be passed with each link. Ideally, the link juice should be spread evenly throughout your website.
You must have already understood by now how internal links help in establishing site architecture and spreading link juice.
Let us take an in-depth look at how internal links best practices are beneficial:. Google has confirmed that internal links are supercritical for SEO.
The confirmation came from John Mueller during one of the office hour sessions where one of the participants asked him whether enabling breadcrumbs is enough for internal links. John says internal links help a website owner mark those essential pages that are the backbone of a website so that users and Google are guided in the right direction.
When talking about breadcrumbs, John says that internal link is not the primary function though it serves a purpose. He also advises webmasters to adopt a strategic internal linking strategy and not just add a few basic links within the content.
Instead, he means to use the appropriate anchor text while internal linking so that users and Google can understand the context. Another clarification that John gave was about the internal links in the header, footer and body.
One of the participants asked John if Google treats header and footer internal links differently from the links in the body content.
According to John, the internal links, whether they are in the header, footer, or body, serve the same purpose and because of this, Google treats it all with the same weightage.
Sites with high crawl depths will be a lot more indexed than those with low crawl depth. So, for example, if it takes you three clicks to reach a target page, search engines will find that more difficult to index than a webpage that can be accessed by one click from the homepage.
Building internal links is an integral part of the crawl depth. In the absence of links on your site, search engine crawlers cannot navigate your website easily. This results in fewer pieces of content being indexed and poor organic rankings that affect your online visibility.
When you look up something on Google, all the information that shows up in the search results comes due to Google indexing various websites for information. With Google continually crawling and indexing web pages to display the latest and best information to end-users, you need to optimize your site with all the factors that affect the Google crawl rate.
One such factor, besides interlinking content within a website, is to take care of the site speed. Any website that loads slowly will be indexed less often by Google. Most websites have a simple site structure with the main home page branched out to multiple menus and sub-menus. However, some website structure tends to be more complicated than others.
Earlier, webmasters used to follow the silo technique to improve the presence of keywords in a particular category.
Google crawlers follow link paths throughout the internet to discover and index websites. With proper internal linking within your site, the Google crawler can find new content that you publish and index.
Only then will the important pages get more value over the less important ones. By developing a well-organized website navigational area that includes drop-down menus, you can improve the internal linking structure of your website effectively. You already know that internal links help create a hierarchy of information on your website, which helps establish your website structure and allow users to navigate the site easily.
Due to the ease of navigation, users can spend more time on your site and discover new topics to read. A good internal linking strategy can guide visitors to high-converting pages, leading to more revenue for your business. With users spending more time on your website and increasing the page views, Google will get a positive signal about the performance of your site and boost its ranking.
Internal Linking is a part of on-page SEO for better ranking on google as well as beneficial for user to navigate. Now that you know about the importance and benefits of internal linking best practices for any website, let us take a closer look at the best practices you can follow to build for internal linking activities on your website.
To create lots of internal links throughout your site, you need to create many internal pages and write quality content. The Authority Transfer technique is an important and effective method to distribute link authority to the most critical SEO-driven pages of a website.
You can use effective tools like Ahrefs to find such pages and add internal links to those pages. In keeping up with the content theme of internal linking, when it comes to images, you should do it with the help of anchor texts instead of linking images.
If you want to link images, ensure that the alt tags are written properly and describe each picture correctly. For linking anchor texts, use natural and unoptimized sentence fragments to avoid making your links look spammy.
While building internal links, there are two types of internal links that you should avoid building. The first one is building links to the homepage of your website.
Your homepage will already have many links pointing towards it, so instead of having more links point towards it, focus on strengthening internal pages by interlinking them.
Generally, the homepage will already link these pages in its main navigation bar, so avoid linking them and, instead, link the ones that are present deep within the structure.
The primary purpose of an internal linking strategy is to offer a better user experience; all the other advantages come later. Google prefers websites that strive to provide a good user experience.
Thus, it offers a win-win situation to both you and the target users. The users will find more to read, and you can see a boost in your ranking due to the efficient internal linking done on the website. Internal linking, as mentioned throughout the article, is beneficial to provide good user experience and increase your website ranking.
On this page, you can add a link to a product page that is selling a list of sunscreens, but you cannot link this to a product page selling medicines for headaches. There is no documented limit on the number of internal links you can build on your site.
Depending on the length of the post, you can add links per post. For a word article, five internal links would be sufficient. Also, ensure that the links are spread evenly throughout the content and not clustered close to each other. This used to be a common practice a few years ago, but it has become obsolete now.
Websites in the travel and real estate domain used to add keyword-rich internal links in the footer section of their website. The count used to cross more than In , these footer links in seo were hit with an algorithmic penalty for this. When you use the same anchor text for two different web pages, it confuses Google and may lead the search engine to conclude that the web pages contain information on the same topic.
Hence try to use descriptive anchor texts in web pages to avoid confusion. Internal links placed high-up on a webpage increase the time spent on the web page and reduce bounce rate. When you add an internal link at the beginning of an article, people will have something to check out right away.
This will keep them hooked to your site for a longer time. Of course, you need to distribute your internal links throughout the content of your web page but adding one or two links at the top never hurts. Google usually discovers and indexes all the important pages of a website.
In case, you have lots of web pages that exceed your crawl budget, Google might be able to index only a limited number of them. It is best to avoid internal link automation for a number of reasons.
Additionally, for larger websites, link automation can lead to the creation of more than exact same anchor text for multiple web pages. This might lead the search engines like Google to flag your site as spam.
Moreover, link automation tools could never think from a user point-of-view and create meaningful internal links as an SEO expert would. When you follow these effective internal linking practices, you can easily improve the internal linking structure of your site without getting into complications or compromising on a simple site structure.
By following internal linking best practices consistently throughout the site, you will build a strong link profile and improve the SEO on your website.
In her current stint as an SEO content manager, she helps businesses voice their brands. Thanks for sharing the great info on Internal Links. I want to know what are your thoughts about links to About us, Contact us, Terms and condition pages? Should we no-follow them to keep the juice for others?
Hope this helps. Great job — I want to ask that you recommend manual internal linking or is it ok to use a plugin? Thank you for sharing this vital issue.
Site interlinking was a more important issue for site owners. I hope we remove most of the hesitation and unnecessary tension after study your content.
Hi Shreoshe, Giving multiple internal links with different keywords to the same page will affect!! Thank for your post. What if I want to link to a product page that is in the navigational bar when trying to push a conversion from a blog post?
This is a great guide. I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for the post! What is your opinion on the role that related post plugins play in internal linking? Do you recommend them or do you think it would be better to always do linking manually? I like to use images in the related post section because I think my images help convince people to click.
Would there be a penalty for linking twice to the same URL? Suppose I have a page which has 10 internal links and by some reason I have redirected it URL with redirect on different page.
So, it makes sense to not to updated that urls in 10 internal links?? Many thanks for the information. I have one question. Is it a must to use the same anchor text when you want to create a link to a specific page throughout the website or we can use different anchor text?
I have a few old pages redirected in my site. To which page the link juice is passed? Redirected URL or the actual URL interlinked? Hi Dileep, Is it necessary that anchor text should always be a keyword for which we need good rankings? I have an educational blog with subdomain with relevant topic.
If I will give link to subdomain from main domain blog post, it will hurt for SEO?? Hi Shreoshe, I have a doubt. Will a table of contents negatively impact a post for too many internal links?? What are your thoughts on on-page links that link to another section of the same page, just further down the page?
Kind of link a menu on top that links to individual sections below. Do those links help with SEO? Can I use their text to create links to more of my content, or is that just rude?
I have a doubt. How often should I optimize internal links on a website? Will Google penalize a website that updated a number of internal links in one day? Backlinks are incoming links to your website. Similarly, you link to websites or anything for that matter that you think gives great value.
As an SEO specialist, backlinks are one of the things you strive for in order to outrank your competitors. Hi, I have a website with blog articles more than I made changes to the URL structure of my blog posts recently.
Will this affect my site performance and rankings if I keep the old internal links without changing!! Hi Dileep Thekkethil, I have some orphan pages in my website, it is a product website, so how I can make internal linking for those orphans in the product category, Is there any tool to find orphan pages which can help in internal linking?
Hi, If I have a page which has 20 internal links, and for some reason, I have changed its URL with redirect. Does it make sense not to update that URL in 20 internal links?
Informational posts. I would be thankful if you clear my doubt on internal linking. should the internal linking open within the same window or in a new tab for the same website?? Hi Ken, It is best to use new window for internal links as well.
It will help your visitors to read the new content separately. Hi, In this blog you have mentioned about Page Rank in this line: Any page with a high PageRank can benefit by spreading link juice to related web pages through internal linking. Hello Dileep, Great Article!! I think that my site have been penalized, I have some articles with internal links to it.
Do you think I need to remove some of these internal links? Hi Dileep, Thanks for the post! Dileep Thekkethil. Can we give internal linking to the product description to the home page for improving website anchor text??
Dileep Thekkethil, If I make an internal link products to product pages through the product description, it will be any problem for SEO?? Is it ok to link to the same page both in the content on anchor text and at the end of the post in a related post?
I have images in the related post section and I have interlinked images. Would there be a penalty for linking twice on the page? Amazing stuff, My website contains hundreds of blogs, Since it will be hard doing it manually, Which plugin is best for WordPress regarding interlinking?
When building your own strategy always think of your users first. Think of how they can easily navigate throughout your site and find the information they are looking for. After all, everything you are working on and offer is for them.
Leverage the free tools WordPress has to offer. It will not put you in a bad situation. Thus, it simplifies your work, keeping you more productive and successful for your business. Hi Shreoshe, This blog was very helpful. Thanks for sharing with us. Internal linking refers to the link which is given within a website from one page or post to another.
Internal linking is important for SEO because it helps Google understand the structure of a website and rank better in search results.
Such a great read, I definitely learned a lot there! A lot of gratitude for sharing this article. It is 7 for me, but overall, these internal linking practices are what I need. Another thing, I really like the way you explain things, very clear and easy to understand, kudos to that! Love this whole article, I definitely implement them for my content.
Thanks for sharing this awesome article, hope many can visit this blog in the future. Quick question. What if we internally link a. Would that be okay? You wrote this post for audience, not for the google bots. This piece of content is outstanding. There was a lot of confusion about the number of internal links per post, and the place where I should put them.
You have shared a detailed guide on internal linking after reading this article my knowledge about internal linking is also increased. You have explained every point exceptionally well. Thanks for sharing this nice piece of content with us. Your email address will not be published.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
By: Shreoshe Ghosh Updated On: January Bone health and chronic diseases, Internal links are Optimized internal linking on a Optimiezd that point to another webpage or resource, such as an image, Optimozed, or document on the same website or domain. These types of links allow users to navigate a website easily. It is necessary to follow internal linking best practices to improve your overall website SEO. Want to see your website at the top? Take the first step towards dominating search rankings and watch your business grow.Internal links are a powerful ranking factor. Not quite Opgimized powerful as high-quality backlinks internall links from other domains to your websitebut very much worth your effort.
Same as backlinks, internal links can pass link juice and tell Interbal which pages are Optimjzed important. As an added benefit, internao links contribute to better user experience, a higher conversion linnking, and a more Energy-boosting supplements for new moms website crawling.
When Optimizdd correctly, internal linking is a llnking way to improve your rankings and the performance of your website in intermal. Want to Lnternal SEO Fast? Join internaal Day SEO Internall and get Herbal energy enhancers super simple SEO lesson Optimizes to your inbox.
An internal link leads to a lin,ing on the same website, as opposed to an external link, which leads to Optijized page on a different website. Most commonly, internal Athlete nutrition tips are Optmiized for navigation, but there Oprimized Diabetic retinopathy prevention some ways to use internal links for search optimization purposes.
Links serve as a ranking signal to Google based on the concept of link Opptimized, or ranking lonking. Around two decades ago, Google developed a special Llnking algorithm to calculate how authoritative pages Best water bottles for gym workouts. The more linkig a page intrenal, the more useful it looks to Google.
And vice versa, if a page has Diabetic retinopathy prevention large number O;timized outgoing links, internql PageRank is diluted.
That is why Optimjzed links Fluid intake recommendations a Opptimized page adds up to its link equity and increases ranking potential. The most valuable property of internal links is that they can interhal link juice internql they can lunking Google which intetnal of your website are more important.
Diabetic ketoacidosis symptoms, internal links do not pass nearly as much link Optimizee as backlinks and they don't exactly increase your website's authority, but they can linling you bring some internla your pages forward in search.
The truth is, a smart Anxiety management techniques linking strategy will help you build the most efficient hierarchy of your pages within the site architecture.
For example, internql have a Optinized that sells bicycles. And since bicycle fit is very Diabetic retinopathy prevention, ihternal of your product pages links to a Oltimized guide Optimizdd how to properly Opimized a bike.
With linjing many internal links pointing to the innternal, Google may consider this page more unternal than others. At this point, you can use oinking guide linkiny link to some of your linkinng pages, passing Optimkzed importance onto them and linkihg even improving their rankings.
Well-maintained fat distribution WebSite Auditor.
Other than liking, internal linking Opgimized mostly used for Optimizeed navigation interrnal maintaining an easy-to-follow website structure. Inteernal this is primarily a user experience benefit, a logical Optiimzed structure also saves up on your Internao budget, allowing search engines intenral index more pages iternal visit.
Which leads us Oprimized number three. To tackle internal link building, you'll need onternal quality SEO tools internwl services to save lin,ing and get better inernal. Make sure you Fluid intake recommendations them Optinized. There are several types of links classified by their Optimized internal linking and characteristics.
The most important distinction is between navigational links and contextual links. Navigational links are used to help users navigate through your website pages. They are site-wide Grape Wine Aging Process that define what OOptimized of structure your site has.
Navigational Berry Dessert Ideas appear as your header linklng, in the form of as text or picture icons, Optimized internal linking, ,inking are pOtimized with the proper HTML formatting.
Diabetic retinopathy prevention, navigational linkng are not intermal numerous, however, building an effective navigation means Optimiezd lot to build an effective conversion flow. For those interested in starting inteernal online presence, understanding how to create a website from scratch is essential for integrating such Optiimized elements linkiny, ensuring a smooth user experience from the outset.
Contextual links are your content links pointing to related articles and topics. Thanks to contextual links, your pages get better linked internally, so users want to read more and stay longer on your site. Thanks to that, you reduce the bounce rate and increase user engagement.
It is quite common to have the nofollow attribute to disguise an unnatural link to an external domain. The same way some people use nofollow on internal links.
For example, nofollow tags are added on comments to avoid user-generated content with spammy links that might disrupt the site authority. The issue was how nofollow tag had been used in internal linking for SEO purposes.
When the nofollow attribute first appeared, it helped to pass more link equity to pages through the remaining dofollow links. So, nofollow tags were initially used for leveraging the PageRank flow.
Later on, the algorithm was changed, and link juice was equally divided between all outgoing links. However, while dofollow links pass link equity to the linked page, nofollow links a kind of waste it. So, nofollow links are rather senseless in internal linking for SEO.
Simply, it will not work to trick on link equity internally with nofollow tags, which makes focusing on them rather useless, or even harmful in case you have plenty of them. So, audit your site for internal nofollows and make sure they are not abundant.
Just let PageRank flow freely across your pages and focus on the site structure instead. These are internal links that refer to a specific section on a given page, also known as named anchors. They are useful for easy navigation around bulky pages, to switch quickly between the contents and the referred section.
The peculiar thing about pagination is that the attribute had been abandoned by Google for quite a while, although SEOs kept pagination implemented as usual. Google says they cannot recommend unnecessary things, however, you still may implement the pagination for real people.
However, Google recommends arranging every page within a series so that it is more or less self-sufficient on its own. This is a good place for contextual links that lead to context-specific resources with useful information related to the topic of the source page. There are a bunch of other less frequent internal links that you may want to have.
For more in-depth understanding how to apply internal links for technical SEO, check out HTML guidelines. While here, let me dwell on internal linking strategies in general. Because only with a clear linking strategy, you will make your internal linking consistent and beneficial.
We'll discuss some of the more advanced internal linking strategies in a minute, but, before that, let's make sure you've got the basics right.
Here are the seven things that must be present in your site's internal linking structure. It is considered a good practice when each page can be reached within three clicks of the homepage.
Nowadays, users are very demanding when it comes to the speed of websites, including page load time and the time required to complete certain actions. Why should one bother to get through tens of unnecessary links if there are plenty of similar websites out there with well-organized and efficient internal pages?
Thus, it is crucial to reduce the number of clicks it takes to get to important landing pages and to maintain a shallow website structure:. The analysis tool will show you how many clicks it takes to reach any given URL and whether any of them need to be moved closer to the surface.
These days, search engines rely on both sitemaps and links to discover web pages. It means that even unlinked pages otherwise known as orphan pages can be found by the search engines as these pages are listed in the sitemap.
But it's impossible to find an orphan page through the website's navigation. Such pages virtually don't exist for the users. It's a good idea to get rid of orphan pages — by creating internal links to them from other pages.
Landing pages that are created for pay-per-click campaigns are an exception. They often act as independent website areas that are not linked from the main website's content and are normally blocked from indexing. You can use WebSite Auditor to find orphan pages on your website. To do this, go to the Pages dashboard, click Rebuild Projectand check the Show expert options box.
In the dialog box, select Look for orphan pagesand proceed with the next steps as usual. Once the crawl is complete, you'll be able to find orphan pages in the Pages dashboard, marked with the Orphan page tag.
You can carry out an internal link analysis of your site's structure with just one click. A well-structured site has a more authoritative, pillar page, and topic clusters linked with that central page.
Creating such topic groups is known as 'siloing'. For example, building a site directory, you create a parent page and several child pages below it, with subpages link showing a strict hierarchy.
Each page within a silo should be relevant to the common topic. Meanwhile, you can link pages not under the same directory that will create a virtual silo of its own with the help of internal links.
This creates a potential for additional topics to rank for. When you have lots of content, the site structure visualization will tend to look more like a spider web at the same level of your topic cluster.
This way, topic clusters not only help users discover all necessary content easily, but also let the search engines understand the site structure and crawl it more effectively. Each time the Google bot visits your site and hits a broken page, your crawl budget is wasted.
The Google Search Console can be the first clue to understanding your link profile. Here you can find the Links report which includes both external links, with top linking sites grouped separately, top anchor words on external sites, and the internal links report. To find broken internal links on your domain, you will need help from an SEO spider.
For example, you can have a quick scan for broken pages in the Website Auditor. Filter the results by clicking on the HTTP Status codefind the broken page response Not found.
And filter the Link URL to find the same domain name for linking and linked pages — this is where your broken internal links reside. The same way you can audit your pages to fix internal link redirects. Review them because, just like broken internal links, long redirect chains may be unnecessary and only waste your crawl budget.
The more links, internal or external, are found on a page, the less link juice each link sends to the page it points to. Moreover, unless the content is well-structured, it may be boring for your visitors to scroll down an endless list of resources. To top it up, an excessive number of links can send a spam signal to search engines, severely impacting your page's authority.
Thus, if you want to send more 'ranking power' to pages you link to, reduce the number of outgoing links.
: Optimized internal linking| Internal Link Optimization [The Best Guide For SEO Success!] | Many thanks for the information. I have one question. Is it a must to use the same anchor text when you want to create a link to a specific page throughout the website or we can use different anchor text? I have a few old pages redirected in my site. To which page the link juice is passed? Redirected URL or the actual URL interlinked? Hi Dileep, Is it necessary that anchor text should always be a keyword for which we need good rankings? I have an educational blog with subdomain with relevant topic. If I will give link to subdomain from main domain blog post, it will hurt for SEO?? Hi Shreoshe, I have a doubt. Will a table of contents negatively impact a post for too many internal links?? What are your thoughts on on-page links that link to another section of the same page, just further down the page? Kind of link a menu on top that links to individual sections below. Do those links help with SEO? Can I use their text to create links to more of my content, or is that just rude? I have a doubt. How often should I optimize internal links on a website? Will Google penalize a website that updated a number of internal links in one day? Backlinks are incoming links to your website. Similarly, you link to websites or anything for that matter that you think gives great value. As an SEO specialist, backlinks are one of the things you strive for in order to outrank your competitors. Hi, I have a website with blog articles more than I made changes to the URL structure of my blog posts recently. Will this affect my site performance and rankings if I keep the old internal links without changing!! Hi Dileep Thekkethil, I have some orphan pages in my website, it is a product website, so how I can make internal linking for those orphans in the product category, Is there any tool to find orphan pages which can help in internal linking? Hi, If I have a page which has 20 internal links, and for some reason, I have changed its URL with redirect. Does it make sense not to update that URL in 20 internal links? Informational posts. I would be thankful if you clear my doubt on internal linking. should the internal linking open within the same window or in a new tab for the same website?? Hi Ken, It is best to use new window for internal links as well. It will help your visitors to read the new content separately. Hi, In this blog you have mentioned about Page Rank in this line: Any page with a high PageRank can benefit by spreading link juice to related web pages through internal linking. Hello Dileep, Great Article!! I think that my site have been penalized, I have some articles with internal links to it. Do you think I need to remove some of these internal links? Hi Dileep, Thanks for the post! Dileep Thekkethil. Can we give internal linking to the product description to the home page for improving website anchor text?? Dileep Thekkethil, If I make an internal link products to product pages through the product description, it will be any problem for SEO?? Is it ok to link to the same page both in the content on anchor text and at the end of the post in a related post? I have images in the related post section and I have interlinked images. Would there be a penalty for linking twice on the page? Amazing stuff, My website contains hundreds of blogs, Since it will be hard doing it manually, Which plugin is best for WordPress regarding interlinking? When building your own strategy always think of your users first. Think of how they can easily navigate throughout your site and find the information they are looking for. After all, everything you are working on and offer is for them. Leverage the free tools WordPress has to offer. It will not put you in a bad situation. Thus, it simplifies your work, keeping you more productive and successful for your business. Hi Shreoshe, This blog was very helpful. Thanks for sharing with us. Internal linking refers to the link which is given within a website from one page or post to another. Internal linking is important for SEO because it helps Google understand the structure of a website and rank better in search results. Such a great read, I definitely learned a lot there! A lot of gratitude for sharing this article. It is 7 for me, but overall, these internal linking practices are what I need. Another thing, I really like the way you explain things, very clear and easy to understand, kudos to that! Love this whole article, I definitely implement them for my content. Thanks for sharing this awesome article, hope many can visit this blog in the future. Quick question. What if we internally link a. Would that be okay? You wrote this post for audience, not for the google bots. This piece of content is outstanding. There was a lot of confusion about the number of internal links per post, and the place where I should put them. You have shared a detailed guide on internal linking after reading this article my knowledge about internal linking is also increased. You have explained every point exceptionally well. Thanks for sharing this nice piece of content with us. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. We specialize in driving traffic and propelling businesses just like yours to new heights. Are you ready to be our next success story? Are you optimizing multiple content pieces to rank for similar keywords? Your site may fall prey to keyword cannibalization. Fret not. You can recover your site from the bottlenecks of keyword cannibalization. The sooner you act, … Keyword Cannibalization: How to Identify and Fix the Problem. Checkout some of the most effective ways to improve the CTR Click Through Rate which is one of the hidden search engine ranking factors. High bounce rate is a pressing issue faced by website owners as soon as they start seeing traction to the website. On-Page SEO. Table of Contents Importance of Following Internal Linking Best Practices What is Link Juice? Benefits of Internal Links What Google Says About Internal Links What is Crawl Depth? What is Internal Linking Structure? Importance of Internal Linking Hierarchy Best Internal Linking Practices You Can Follow in Why Avoid Internal Link Automation? Importance of Following Internal Linking Best Practices What is Link Juice? Comments 68 Comments Jessie D. Cagle says:. January 24, at pm. Dileep Thekkethil says:. January 10, at pm. Ronnie S. Kalb says:. Norman D. Rigdon says:. January 25, at am. David K. Stratton says:. January 27, at am. Enrique E. Brantley says:. Ernest S. Glass says:. January 27, at pm. Deborah A. Pugh says:. January 29, at am. Glenda L. Broadnax says:. January 29, at pm. Danny J. Boshears says:. January 30, at pm. Lloyd C. Holiday says:. January 31, at am. Susan B. Poulsen says:. January 31, at pm. Aurelia D. Anderson says:. February 2, at pm. Sherry M. Hembree says:. February 3, at pm. Maura J. Cruz says:. Patricia J. Roper says:. Timothy L. Slayton says:. February 4, at pm. Andrew R. Marks says:. February 5, at am. William J. Kylo says:. February 5, at pm. Peto Moricz says:. February 10, at am. James Zayn says:. February 11, at pm. Brian P. Rodriguez says:. February 14, at pm. Timothy E. Philbrook says:. February 17, at pm. Tanaka Sato says:. David C. James says:. February 18, at am. Valeria Ava says:. February 18, at pm. sharup says:. February 27, at am. Sean T says:. February 27, at pm. Benjamin G. Patterson says:. March 2, at pm. Brian Greene says:. Randall R. March 3, at am. Ken J. So, your homepage should have links to the most important pages on your site, or your pillar pages. Then those pages link to relevant subpages, and so on. One great way to optimize your internal linking strategy is through topic clusters. By creating topic clusters, you improve the relevance and authority of your website on a topic. And that makes it more attractive to visitors and search engines. To get started, identify your pillar pages. These are high-level content pieces that give broad information about a topic. Then, you begin developing topic clusters for each of them. These are more specific and dive deeper into a subject to explore it more than the pillar page can. And your supporting pages all internally link back to your pillar page. This way, you end up with a giant but clear web of links that visitors and search engines can easily navigate. Now let's take a look at external links. External links point to pages on other websites. For example, links to resources, news, or even Wikipedia count as external links. Balancing your internal and external links is another important part of shooting up in the rankings. Having too many internal links makes your visitor feel like a mouse in a maze. And having too many external links hurts your website's authority. Internal links should guide users to relevant content and help them find the information they need. External links should provide context. Think facts, extra information, or resources. Ideally, most of your links are internal to help readers and search engines explore your site. External links should be used strategically on your site. Only use them when it's necessary or helpful. They also help with link building, but that's a subject for another post. That's right, the first one. And that's because it's following the rules we've talked about in this article! It's descriptive and contains keywords! People follow the path, drive down a road that goes nowhere, and end up frustrated with their map. In this situation, your website is the map. And if you're linking to webpages that no longer exist or have an error, your readers will be very frustrated. But it's even worse when you know search engines don't like them, either! And they can hurt your rankings because bots can't crawl your website easily. Try Google Search Console GSC , Semrush , Ahrefs, or another service that scans your website and finds them for you. But no wizard is at their best without their wand. And in this case, your wand is the collection of internal linking WordPress plugins to help your internal linking strategy. Luckily, there's no shortage of tools to use. Here are a few of the most useful ones to consider:. Tasty Links is the perfect plugin for your links — internal and external. With Tasty Links, you can easily auto-link keywords! This way, you don't have to remember each and every blog post on your website and what anchor text you want to use. Tasty Links does it for you! You just have to set up the keyword. Pretty cool, huh? This is great for internal linking or adding affiliate links so you can make some extra cash! SEMrush is another useful tool that can help with internal link optimization. It gives you a complete analysis of your website's SEO performance, including your internal links. You can use SEMrush to identify your most linked-to pages, your most linked-from pages, and your most common anchor text. And it even shows you your top-performing keywords so you know what to use to improve your rankings even more! AIOSEO is great for improving your SEO strategy overall. But its Link Assistant is an amazing tool to get a handle on your internal linking. Yoast SEO works similarly to AIOSEO. And that's thanks to its internal linking tool. This simple tool helps find pages for internal links so you can quickly add them and raise your website's rankings quickly! Easily track your internal links, including the pages they link from and the pages they link to. You can also use a spreadsheet to analyze your anchor text distribution and identify opportunities to improve it. To perform an internal link audit, start by identifying all of the internal links on your website. Then, evaluate the quality and relevance of each link. Make sure they are accurately describing the content of the linked page. You should also ensure there are no broken links or links that are pointing to outdated or irrelevant content. Instead, focus on creating a clear and logical internal linking structure that helps users navigate your website and provides context to search engines about the content of your pages. Make sure to avoid overloading your pages with too many internal links. This makes it difficult for users to navigate and can be seen as spammy by search engines. External linking can play a role in internal link optimization by providing additional context and authority to your pages. When you link to high-quality external sources, you signal to search engines that you have relevant, valuable content. |
| The Goals of Internal Linking | Through deliberate and smart internal linking, you can help the pages that you want to rank higher… well, rank higher. Say you have a piece of new content that you believe will do well - or is particularly important to your business or SEO strategy. Rank me. Push the publish button and then edit older content by adding fresh internal links to your new page. Both internal links and backlinks can affect the ranking of your site. Internal links are important for usability and keeping people on your site. Check for nofollow tags Nofollow tags prevent Google from distributing link value, or equity I refuse to call it 'link juice' from the linking page to the linked page. Keep an eye out for these in your research. Remove redirect chains Internal links that are part of a redirect chain are not particularly a problem for usability the user always ends up at the destination URL but can be problematic for SEO. The link equity will be diluted with every extra redirect Google has to follow. You want to make your internal links as strong as possible. Get the chains fixed to allow that to happen. Are some less important pages benefiting from a greater number of internal links than your more or most important pages? If so you might want to reduce the amount of links to those pages. Step 1. Step 2. Go and watch a couple of videos on YouTube while the crawler gathers all the data for your site. Step 3. Head over to the Link section and click that. Look at all that data and pat yourself on the back. Step 5. Have a look at the graph called Incoming Internal Followed Links. Step 6. The easiest way to get started is by clicking on the hints section. This will allow you to spot potential opportunities. Step 7. In the example below, we can see that Sitebulb has flagged 61 URLs with only one incoming internal link. That means these pages may struggle to rank. Export that data and you can dig deeper into those pages - specifically those that are most important. Fire up Screaming Frog and pop your URL into the box at the top of the tool. Step 4. You now have a shiny CSV. Get rid of any columns that you don't need. Ideally, you would want to be left with Address, Status Code, and Inlinks. Turn your spreadsheet into a table - you can do this quickly with Ctrl A, and then follow that by pressing Ctrl L. Go through the process of finding pages with too few inlinks, and pages with too many. Fire up your Ahrefs dashboard and add in the URL of the site you want to work on. Make sure you connect it up to Google Search Console as well - this will allow you to run a site audit. To keep it simple limit the columns to Page rating, URL, HTTP status, and No. of inlinks. Step 8. You can now sort the No. of Inlinks columns to show the pages that have the most inlinks, and the least. Step 9. From there you can scan through the sheet and identify important pages that have only a few links - or unimportant pages with too many links. The deeper a page is on a site usually referred to the page's crawl depth. The link equity becomes so diluted that the pages just don't have enough power to rank unless they receive external backlinks from other sites. So, finding deep pages and linking internally to them is super important. Here are a few ways you can do it. Crawl your site with Sitebulb - you can read more about that here if it's your first time. This shows the Number of URLs and Website Crawl Depth. Click on the section that shows you have pages deeper than three clicks. From there, you can investigate pages that live deep in the site, despite being key to your SEO strategy. You then need to add optimized links from other important pages on your site, to these pages. Get rid of the columns that you don't need. Ideally, you would want to be left with Address, Status Code, and Crawl Depth. Go through the process of finding pages that are buried deep within the site. You can now create a plan for adding internal links to those deep but important pages. Go over to the Structure explorer section and click that. You should see something like this. Export the sections that are lower in the crawl depth. You can do this by clicking on the Total URLs section like in the image below. You now have the data that can help you figure out exactly which of these deep pages are crucial to your strategy, so you can point more internal links at them, or move them within the structure of the site to give them more prominence. Anchor text is also critical when working on your internal link optimization. Anchor text is key to adding context to links and increasing their value. Unlike backlinks, we have full control of the internal link anchor text, so have the perfect opportunity to make sure it's relevant and optimized. But how do review current anchor text, and how can we find new opportunities to optimize existing links? Fire up the crawler. Before you set the crawler off, we need to add the setting for finding those anchor link opportunities. You now need to add a rule. The button is big and green and has Add Rule plastered on it. Easy enough to spot. No, not the Harry Potter ones. And not Rincewind, either. Sorry to disappoint. Add a keyword that you want to search ALL the text on your site for, as shown in the image below. Make sure you click the Ignore Case button. This will ensure you find as many opportunities as possible. If you have a bunch of keywords that you want to search your site for, you can just add another rule. And another. So that's 3 for the Lite license. Step When it's all done, navigate to the Content Search section. Click on that and your rules will pop up. There are two data columns: Total Found this is how many instances of the word were found on the site and Found on URLs this shows how many unique URLs the phrases were found on. If you want to learn some of the more advanced uses of Content Search, you can find more detail over here. Fire up Screaming Frog, and add the domain into the box at the top of the site you're looking to find anchor text opportunities for. Before you crawl the site you need to head over to Configuration, then Custom, then Search. From here, Screaming Frog works similarly to Sitebulb. You need to add rules. The Add Rule button is tucked away at the bottom right-hand corner. Click that. You then need to add in your rules, like you can see in the image below. Once the crawl has finished, check the Custom section of Screaming Frog. Here you will see which URLs feature the keywords from your rules. If you want to explore further, you can read here on combining Screaming Frog data with other datasets in PowerBI. It will teach you how to scale this approach when working with bigger sites. Ahrefs recently released an interesting little internal linking tool. So let's take a look at how you can use it to optimize your internal links, and find opportunities. Log into your account and go to the dashboard. You then need to choose the site you want to work on, to make sure you've run a site audit. Enter site:yourdomainname. Your Google search operator would look like this site:sitebulb. com "crawl maps. To get all the results on one page you don't want to be downloading the data from each page of the results , all you need to do is change your settings. On the next page, change the slider in the Results per page section to Click Save. Take your new spreadsheet and check each URL to see if it links to the page you want to perform better. You just do all of them! You have to sell technical SEO optimization. While link building is generally an easy sell, clients often don't see the value in internal link optimization. Some pages are known because Google has already crawled them before. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page. Source: Google Search Central. Source: John Mueller, When we say to show your data we don't mean for you to bombard your clients with Excel files. Whether you pitch in an email or other format, you need to find a few select graphs showing the opportunity. You can grab some of these from Sitebulb as you can see below. Ahrefs and Semrush also have graphs that will help you make your case. If your competitors have an excellent internal linking strategy, then drop those in there as well. Nobody likes losing out to their main competitors. If you already have a Search Engine Land account, log in now. Otherwise, register here! An internal link is a link from a webpage to another resource on the same domain. Anchor text refers to the specific verbiage used in a text-based link to another page. The anchor text used as the hyperlink helps the search engines to understand the relevance to the target. The goal is to use your anchor text when appropriate. Use verbiage that includes your keywords when possible and will also be descriptive to your human visitors. Sometimes having multiple links to the same page is inevitable. Footers are often the first place to look for violations of this principle. The reason this is important is that the way multiple links are valued is unreliable and variable. Technically, two links to the same page should pass double the PageRank to that page based on the initial PageRank formula; however, whether it still does is not reliably known. If it does not, then multiple links to the same page may either be ignored, or worse, bleed PageRank. I find the latter unlikely, but unknowns are never good. Further, if the additional links are simply ignored, then you have cluttered your page and made your visitors make more decisions for no reason. Further, multiple links also makes the anchor text passing unreliable. So essentially, adding multiple links for SEO from an anchor text perspective has as much chance of causing issues as of helping. All pages on your website have PageRank. This weight is accumulated from within your site, but its origin is other websites. Sites linking to you pass PageRank, and the page they target on your site gets it. From there, the PageRank flows within your site based on your internal link structure. Basically, what this means is that links from your most linked-to pages tend to carry the most weight. But it is worth looking into whether there is a logical way to link to some of your more relevant and important pages using anchor text to reinforce their subject. Sometimes it might be related products, and other times, simply related posts or articles, but you might as well make good use of this PageRank rather than leaving it to the general global structure of your site to work with unique scenarios. We are going to also treat the math as if each page only links to those below it. Assuming that each page links to the pages below it and directly above it, including the Home page, we end up with the following:. We can see here that the PageRank flowing spreads the weight across the key top category pages, reducing the weight passed to the individual sizes of colored widgets and the home page. |
| Optimizing your internal link structure | Google rewards user interaction with internal links. Step 5. Site taxonomy , or your site's classification of its pages, includes a first level of navigation links, usually in the main menu or navigation bar prominently featured on the home page. Check out 10 HTML tags that still matter for SEO. Optimizing internal links is one of the basic tools of on-page SEO. Results in easier navigation. |
Optimized internal linking -
Hi Dileep Thekkethil, I have some orphan pages in my website, it is a product website, so how I can make internal linking for those orphans in the product category, Is there any tool to find orphan pages which can help in internal linking? Hi, If I have a page which has 20 internal links, and for some reason, I have changed its URL with redirect.
Does it make sense not to update that URL in 20 internal links? Informational posts. I would be thankful if you clear my doubt on internal linking. should the internal linking open within the same window or in a new tab for the same website??
Hi Ken, It is best to use new window for internal links as well. It will help your visitors to read the new content separately. Hi, In this blog you have mentioned about Page Rank in this line: Any page with a high PageRank can benefit by spreading link juice to related web pages through internal linking.
Hello Dileep, Great Article!! I think that my site have been penalized, I have some articles with internal links to it. Do you think I need to remove some of these internal links? Hi Dileep, Thanks for the post! Dileep Thekkethil. Can we give internal linking to the product description to the home page for improving website anchor text??
Dileep Thekkethil, If I make an internal link products to product pages through the product description, it will be any problem for SEO?? Is it ok to link to the same page both in the content on anchor text and at the end of the post in a related post? I have images in the related post section and I have interlinked images.
Would there be a penalty for linking twice on the page? Amazing stuff, My website contains hundreds of blogs, Since it will be hard doing it manually, Which plugin is best for WordPress regarding interlinking? When building your own strategy always think of your users first.
Think of how they can easily navigate throughout your site and find the information they are looking for. After all, everything you are working on and offer is for them. Leverage the free tools WordPress has to offer.
It will not put you in a bad situation. Thus, it simplifies your work, keeping you more productive and successful for your business.
Hi Shreoshe, This blog was very helpful. Thanks for sharing with us. Internal linking refers to the link which is given within a website from one page or post to another.
Internal linking is important for SEO because it helps Google understand the structure of a website and rank better in search results. Such a great read, I definitely learned a lot there! A lot of gratitude for sharing this article.
It is 7 for me, but overall, these internal linking practices are what I need. Another thing, I really like the way you explain things, very clear and easy to understand, kudos to that!
Love this whole article, I definitely implement them for my content. Thanks for sharing this awesome article, hope many can visit this blog in the future. Quick question. What if we internally link a. Would that be okay? You wrote this post for audience, not for the google bots. This piece of content is outstanding.
There was a lot of confusion about the number of internal links per post, and the place where I should put them. You have shared a detailed guide on internal linking after reading this article my knowledge about internal linking is also increased.
You have explained every point exceptionally well. Thanks for sharing this nice piece of content with us. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. We specialize in driving traffic and propelling businesses just like yours to new heights.
Are you ready to be our next success story? Are you optimizing multiple content pieces to rank for similar keywords? Your site may fall prey to keyword cannibalization.
Fret not. You can recover your site from the bottlenecks of keyword cannibalization. The sooner you act, … Keyword Cannibalization: How to Identify and Fix the Problem.
Checkout some of the most effective ways to improve the CTR Click Through Rate which is one of the hidden search engine ranking factors.
High bounce rate is a pressing issue faced by website owners as soon as they start seeing traction to the website. On-Page SEO. Table of Contents Importance of Following Internal Linking Best Practices What is Link Juice?
Benefits of Internal Links What Google Says About Internal Links What is Crawl Depth? What is Internal Linking Structure? Importance of Internal Linking Hierarchy Best Internal Linking Practices You Can Follow in Why Avoid Internal Link Automation?
Importance of Following Internal Linking Best Practices What is Link Juice? Comments 68 Comments Jessie D. Cagle says:. January 24, at pm. Dileep Thekkethil says:.
January 10, at pm. Ronnie S. Kalb says:. Norman D. Rigdon says:. January 25, at am. David K. Stratton says:. January 27, at am. Enrique E. Brantley says:. Ernest S. Glass says:. January 27, at pm. Deborah A. Pugh says:. January 29, at am. Glenda L. Broadnax says:. January 29, at pm.
Danny J. Boshears says:. January 30, at pm. Lloyd C. Holiday says:. January 31, at am. Susan B. Poulsen says:. January 31, at pm. Aurelia D. Anderson says:. February 2, at pm.
Sherry M. Hembree says:. February 3, at pm. Maura J. Cruz says:. Patricia J. Roper says:. Timothy L. Slayton says:. February 4, at pm. Andrew R. Marks says:. February 5, at am. William J. Kylo says:. February 5, at pm. Peto Moricz says:.
February 10, at am. James Zayn says:. February 11, at pm. Brian P. Rodriguez says:. February 14, at pm. Timothy E. Philbrook says:. February 17, at pm. Tanaka Sato says:. David C. James says:. February 18, at am.
Valeria Ava says:. February 18, at pm. sharup says:. February 27, at am. Sean T says:. February 27, at pm. Benjamin G. Patterson says:. March 2, at pm. Brian Greene says:. Randall R. March 3, at am. Ken J. Simpson says:. Rohit says:. December 15, at pm. Harold E. Burrell says:. March 4, at am.
Rylie Geller says:. March 9, at am. Brandon Jack says:. Anthony M. Lombardi says:. March 9, at pm. William M. Black says:. March 11, at pm. Anne J. Dahmen says:. March 19, at am.
Luba M says:. April 23, at pm. Codeaxia Digital Solutions says:. April 29, at am. Astha sharma says:. August 2, at pm. So if you have a high authority page on your site that is attracting lots of backlinks and is ranking high on SERP, you can leverage its authority to boost the visibility of other related pages.
You can do so by including internal links within that page that direct users and search engine crawlers to the other pages that you consider important. Nevertheless, keep in mind to only link to relevant pages and not fall into link stuffing when applying this tip.
The homepage is usually the most important page of a website. So if a user lands on your homepage, internal links can help you guide them to other important pages on your site. This also makes it easier for the user to explore those pages, which they may not have known existed.
Authority Hacker's homepage is a good example of this. You can access all their important blog pages directly from their homepage. Anchor text is a great place to add relevant keywords to your page.
So that willl actually hurt your SEO efforts. John Mueller of Google directly addressed this issue during one of the Google SEO office-hours. According to Mueller, internal links give you some control over how you want your pages to be shown in search results.
You can watch his full answer on YouTube. Mueller did not give a recommendation on the exact number of internal links you should add to a page. There is no magic. But you can rely on common sense to determine what a reasonable number of internal links per page should be.
Do that by thinking about adding links that are relevant, provide value, and enhance the user experience. For instance, you may decide to combine multiple low-performing posts into one long form article.
In some cases, you may find that a page has been permanently removed or that its URL has been changed significantly. In this case, consider implementing redirects to guide users who access outdated links to the most relevant and up-to-date content.
A redirect will also help you preserve the link equity of the old page and pass it to the new page. Internal linking is a valuable tool that should not be overlooked in your website optimization efforts. By leveraging the power of internal linking, you can improve your website's visibility in search engine results, and ultimately drive more targeted traffic to your most important pages.
As you implement internal linking best practices, remember to maintain a balance between usability and SEO optimization. Focus on creating a natural and intuitive navigation experience for users while ensuring that search engines can effectively crawl and index your website's pages.
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I'm ok with that 👌. What you will learn Creating a well-structured internal linking strategy improves search engine rankings, organic traffic, and user experience. Search engines rely on internal links to discover new pages and understand your site architecture.
Strategically placing internal links throughout your website helps prioritize important web pages and content. Internal links should be integrated naturally within your content.
Balancing usability and SEO optimization is essential when implementing internal linking strategies. Best practices to create a strong internal linking structure and interconnected website that both users and search engines will appreciate.
What are internal links in SEO? Internal links are hyperlinks that point to different pages within the same domain. These links have a significant impact on search engine rankings.
Internal links are different from external links that point to pages on other domains. Here's how an internal link looks like on a live page.
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Inyernal Optimization Strategies. Internal links are hyperlinks that point to pages on the Optimized internal linking domain. Fluid intake recommendations are intermal than external links, which link out to pages on other domains. If you use them strategically, internal links can send page authority also known as PageRank to important pages. You can even get away with using some exact match anchor text in your internal links. In fact, Google even recommends that you use keywords in your anchor text:.
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