The internal linking strategy

Most professional business owners and content creators understand the importance of external links. External links are one of the most important ranking factors (this has been confirmed in various studies) and external links are a very strong signal of trust from other quality websites.

But where many different businesses face the problem is using internal links to transfer the value of the link to where it can have the most impact. Internal links cannot bring you the value that external links have, but they are very useful for driving traffic to pages that usually receive fewer links or that need to be boosted in the SERPs.

In this article, we’ll break down the dos and don’ts of good link-building and explain why you need an internal link-building strategy. Then we explain three different strategies you can use to target keywords with different levels of competition and search volume.

What is internal linking?

Before your content can rank, it needs links. Google finds it best when it links to your posts and pages somewhere on the web. Internal linking also connects the content and gives Google an idea about the structure of the website.

They can create a hierarchy on the site and allow you to link more to the most important pages and posts than to other pages with less value. Therefore, the use of internal linking is that it can improve your site’s SEO, And At Creative Bak we have got your back to submit a form that will help you with your web project.

In general, internal linking is any link that is created from one page on your website to another page on the same website. Users use links to navigate your site and find the content they want to find.

Search engines also use links to guide your site. If there is no link to it, they will not find a page.

In addition to the links on the home page, menu, post feed, etc., you can add links to your content, which are called text links. Text links allow search engines to find that your site’s content is relevant and determine the value of that content.

The more internal links an important page has, the more important it is to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are very important for your SEO.

What is the use of internal linking?

In the following, we mention some internal link-building applications that will strengthen your site:

• They transfer power from one page to another (search optimization).
• They direct visitors to valuable and relevant content.
• They compel visitors to act, as a call to action (conversion optimization).

How do internal links affect SEO?

When a page is linked to another page, it transfers some of its credit to that page and increases the likelihood of the second-page ranking. External links bypass Domain Authority and increase the power (and potential rank) of all pages on your website.

Internal links do not and will only pass power between pages on your website. They don’t increase your domain strength, but they do “page authority” from one page to another.

Internal linking allows pages to help each other in search engine rankings. You should never forget this point when developing an internal linking strategy.

What is the difference between internal and external linking?

While search engines such as Google have set relevant spam filters for links through their search algorithms, this restriction does not apply to internal links.

This means that nowadays, for example, “hard” keyword links should be avoided in external links in order not to receive a penalty from Google.

In internal links, the use of keywords in the text of the link is of particular importance so that search engines can navigate the website better. Unlike external links, problems related to internal links are not much to worry about; Because it is possible to link from any point of the domain to any desired URL within the domain.

How to create an internal SEO link structure

What your link structure looks like is highly dependent on your goals (which you’ll understand better in later sections when we explore different link-building strategies), but there are a few parts that are always the same:

1- Create a limited click depth

During an evaluation of Google Webmaster Central in mid-2018, John Mueller confirmed that the fewer clicks to get to a page from your homepage, the better. I suggest that you try to keep the structure of your site as shallow as possible and if possible, try to make each page reachable with two or three clicks from the main page or using the board crumb method, tag Use clouds and built-in search so that users can access more complex pages more easily.

2- Place a link in the main content of your pages

There are two different types of links: navigational links and contextual links. Navigational links are links that are located in the header, footer, and navigation bars that help the user to find other pages in the same domain as crawled by search engines on your website. Contextual links (these are the links we talk about in this article) are placed in the main content of the page and have more SEO value.

3- Put key phrases in your anchor texts

Most SEO experts suggest that it is better not to use exact match keywords in the anchor texts of internal links, but a better suggestion is that our anchor texts should generally be in such a way that the reader knows that by clicking on What page is the anchor text taken to? Using keywords in anchor texts, if you are producing high-quality content, will not cause any problems for you. Also, remember to always include alt text on your link images that include keywords (these texts act like anchor text for text links).

4- Make sure that all your important pages are linked

Search engines can usually find isolated pages. Pages that are not linked to any other page. But users can’t. Based on the nature of these pages, you can delete them, link them to each other, or prevent them from being indexed.

The necessity of an internal linking strategy

According to CMMI’s 2019 B2B benchmark, 81 percent of B2B businesses believe that content strategies align their teams around common goals and missions and help them identify what they need to do. What content to create?

The same goes for internal linking strategies. The better you understand how you want the value of your links to impact your business, the better you can use your internal linking structure to achieve your goals.

Internal links can be a great tool if used properly. Creating stable and transparent internal links makes it possible to:

• Provide additional and useful information for visitors.
• It helps Google and other search engines to crawl your website faster.
• They drive traffic to high-converting pages that have little traffic, such as product pages.
• Promotes pages that are on the second page of SERPs.
• It improves rankings for high, medium, and low search volume keywords.

The best internal linking strategies benefit both parties, as they influence user engagement metrics (such as the number of page views per user period, time spent on site, conversion rates, etc.) and It also affects your ranking in the SERPs for high-priority keywords. You can achieve these goals by considering the customer journey on the website and finding the right link-building strategy for you.

Now, we’re going to introduce you to three strategies you can use to target keywords based on search volume and competition level.

3 internal website linking strategies

We have some suggestions for you to improve your internal linking, which we will discuss with you below:

1) Connecting the main page with keywords with high search volume (Search Volume)

When your goal is to rank for a few keywords with high search volume and high competition, you need to have a high-detail home page to use this strategy, such as a landing page-style home page. that makes potential customers attracted to your site and then convinced to continue the shopping journey on the home page.

How to structure internal links: While your navigation links usually help the user find new content and pages on your website, most of your contextual links should lead to the home page through relevant anchor text. You will be linked (for example, the target keywords plus their close synonyms).

Structurally, this means that you will have links that go to your home page more than any other page. This means that visitors to your high-quality subpages can quickly return to your informative home page.

But as discussed above, if you refer to the same URL multiple times on the same page, priority is given to the first anchor text. With this in mind, some webmasters limit access to navigation links for search engine bots only to the top of the page so that contextual links become more important.

This means that:

The sole purpose of this strategy is to help improve your homepage ranking. You can use every opportunity and every piece of content you have to drive more organic traffic to your homepage.

2) Target keywords with medium search volume and drive traffic to the main landing pages

You can use this strategy when you want to drive keyword traffic with moderate search volume to key pages on your site, such as the product category page on an online store website or blog categories on a news-style website. do. This method is very useful in content category pages that contain various details and comparisons related to products, blog posts, etc.

How to structure internal links:

In this method, you use different anchor texts to drive people to the main category pages. In this way, the job of your home page is to drive people to the relevant category pages. Help articles and product pages should all refer to these pages, and in this context, anchor texts of medium length can be used, which will cause the most possible traffic to be transferred to your category pages.

This method makes each page of your category become an information network so the user can get new information by revisiting them.

For example, a website that sells used cars could have a category page for Ford pickup trucks. Whenever they publish a new article introducing a new model or comparing one Ford pickup to another, they can include a link to the category page using various anchor texts. send them themselves (with anchor texts such as buying Ford vans, second-hand Ford vans, etc.)

3) Targeting keywords with low search volume for low-level pages

You can use this method when you are in a limited niche and want to send quality leads to your specific landing pages, such as specific blog posts or product listings.

How to structure internal links:

Pages that are at a lower level should be detailed enough so that you can include text and images in them that are organically linked to other pages at lower levels.

The purpose of this method is to bring the user to the final page, when the user buys different products or uses different content, these pages are available to him. For example, you might have a multi-part blog series that automatically links internally. You may also have product pages for fitness equipment that are linked to comparison pages and indoor exercise projects that you can do at home using the tools provided on the site.

The less competition there is for your keyword, the better your pages are likely to rank and convert. You just need to make sure that your target search terms are words that users search for.

How to implement internal linking strategies

Once you’ve determined your desired link-building strategy that will help you reach your goals, it’s time to evaluate your internal links and anchor text. For this step, I strongly suggest that you use a tool that can evaluate click depth, incoming links to pages, and important metrics so that you can determine the importance of different pages on your website.

Fortunately, there are hundreds of tools such as WebSite Auditor, DeepCrawl, or Sitebulb that help webmasters understand at a glance which pages are worth the most links to share, showing the current structure of your internal links. And it determines which pages are currently attracting the most traffic to them. Using an SEO evaluation tool like this will help you filter URLs with different substrings and make sure each page has enough detail and the correct anchor text is used for it.

Internal linking techniques for new articles

There are many creative ways and methods for everything, the world of SEO and content creation is also full of such techniques. In the following, we will examine 2 practical techniques for effective internal linking to new articles together. These items are very helpful in formulating the website’s internal linking strategy.

Number of internal links on a page

In general, the purpose of building an internal link on a page is to increase its credibility and value according to the page it links to. New articles also need high credibility so that search engines like Google bring it to their results.

The important thing is that when creating internal links in the content, you should not overdo it and create too many links, because this will reduce the value that each link conveys to the page. Therefore, when you want to link from previous articles to your new content, do not increase the number of links.

Location of the link on the page

The position of the link on the page may not be very important at first glance, but it is one of the most basic points related to creating internal links. In general, when the link is placed in the first paragraphs of the text, especially in the first 100 words, it conveys more credibility.

How to link old content to new articles?

In general, when you publish a new article on your site, some links are automatically given to it, for example, these articles are displayed as newly published content on the main page of the site, and this is a type of internal link.

But these types of links are not permanent and they disappear when new articles are published. The permanent method of linking to new articles is to go to older articles and by editing them, create an internal link for the article in question. In the following, we will learn how to build internal links using this method.

To make internal links, we need to find the content related to the new content and link them to our content, of course, checking all the content of the site and finding related topics is a very time-consuming and difficult task. To solve this problem, we have to go to Google search. let’s go.

To find related articles, you must first type the term site: in Google and write your site address in front of it, and then search for the keyword related to your article. Next, Google displays a list of published content on your site that is in this field.