Insights For Professionals published Dmitrii Kustov’s article: “Internal Linking for SEO: Here’s How to Improve Your Site.”

Internal linking is a great SEO technique that can help users navigate your website, distribute link juice to other pages, and improve your SERP rankings and conversions.

In this article, you’ll find a comprehensive guide to improving your site’s internal linking structure. Some points mentioned in the article include:

INDEXING

Search engines use web crawlers to find content and index pages on your website. If there are no links available, pages may not get indexed, which essentially makes them invisible to the search engine.

USER EXPERIENCE

By inserting relevant internal links, you can contribute to a good user experience in several ways. By doing so, you’ll experience benefits such as:

• decreased bounce rates
• improved page views
• improved navigation and conversion

In addition, this article will familiarize you with the top practices for internal linking.

ANCHOR TEXT

Anchor text is the highlighted words used to create a hyperlink to another page. It can help search engines navigate your site and can benefit SEO value when used properly. 

IMPORTANT PAGES

A good internal linking strategy should use high authority pages to increase the visibility of new or important content on your site. Homepages, contact pages, and “About Us” sections will already have a lot of authority and visitors by virtue of being in the top-level navigation. You can (and should) link from these pages, but avoid linking to these pages.

REVIEW

Internal links must be reviewed and updated regularly. Broken links aren’t only frustrating to users but can also hamper site crawlers indexing your site.

PLACEMENT

Internal links within the content will give you the most juice for SEO and page authority, so think about what other site content you can link to when creating new content. The most useful links will be near the top of the page, where they’ll have the most visibility. Remember, you shouldn’t link to something just for the sake of having a link.

NO-FOLLOW VS. DO-FOLLOW LINKS

A no-follow link is tagged with a command that stops search engines from crawling a site. By default, most links are do-follow, which allows the search engines to follow the link while mapping a site. Since a large part of an internal linking strategy helps with SEO, it’s important to use do-follow links.

NATURAL LINKS

There’s a fine line between a useful and overwhelming number of links. You shouldn’t confuse or distract users with excess links. Using relevant links will help your users find what they’re actually looking for and will help build your site’s authority on specific topics.

Using natural links ensures your site doesn’t appear spammy. And limiting the number of links to only those relevant and useful to your audience will help you guide your users to targeted information, rather than overwhelming them with too many choices.

TRACKING

Tracking user behavior will be an important part of understanding how users interact with internal links and what effect those links have on your site’s conversions. Although you probably don’t need to track every single internal link, tracking those when trying a new strategy or tactic can quickly tell you how effective it is and if it’s helping you with your goals.

Having a quality internal linking strategy has become an essential part of SEO. It’s a beneficial way to help your site’s users find and interact with relevant and important content. Finding the right balance for internal links is critical to success in search engines and client conversions.

If you still have questions or would like to learn about internal linking, read the full version of this article.