The Benefits of Internal Linking

Creating the best content for your readers can be challenging and may rely heavily on the best SEO practices to get your website’s traction.

One of the important SEO Practices that you can follow today is internal linking. Internal linking is essential for helping your website rank for the keywords your website is targeting.

In this article, we will discuss the benefits of internal linking, its benefits, and much more. Then you’ll learn three tips for implementing internal linking effectively on your website. Let’s get started!

What Internal Linking Is (And How It Can Benefit Your Site)

Internal linking simply means linking your content to other web pages within your website. This is opposite to the external linking which occurs when you provide links to other websites.

Internal linking is important for several reasons, which are as follows-

• Internal linking is one of the best practices recommended by Google
• It encourages the reader to navigate to other relevant topics written by the same author for further information
• It decreases the bounce rate which is essential to ranking higher on Google

Implementing internal linking is essential for making your website rank higher as well as delivering huge value to your website.

How to Use Internal Linking Effectively (3 Simple Tips)

Here are the ways you can use internal linking effectively on your website-

Use Optimized and Relevant Anchor Text

As the name suggests, Anchor text means anchoring a link through a link. It is the first thing the user sees when they want to click on the link. It gives them a context on what page they are going to.

You should use the anchor text that fits naturally into the words around it, letting the content maintain its flow without artificially trying to include the anchor text.

You can follow these tips when adding internal links-

• You should keep the internal linking as natural and relevant as possible. Using unwanted and unnatural phrases could be bad and awkward to read to
• Avoid using generic anchor text like “Click Here”, “Find out more”, etc. This type of anchor text does not include any information that brings value to your user
• When a reader reads through the website looking at the linked text and predicts exactly what kind of content to expect when they click through.

Link to High-Quality Content

Linking to high-quality content is a must when you are doing linking for your website. Since you already know that your website has good quality content, you can link to your pages and establish a good value for your website visitors.

In addition, the more links a web page has pointing to it, the higher its pagerank – this is a key factor in Google search rankings.

Now the question might come, what constitutes high-quality content can be quite subjective, however, there are a few universal signs you can follow to choose the best internal content to link to:

• Focus on Actionability: when you have actionable content that provides more value to your readers. While you should try to make your current article as helpful as possible and you can also link to other actionable content on your site to provide greater depth.
• Keep it Relevant: Always keep the internal links that are directly related to the content

You can get started first by finding the most popular content on your website. You can also use the pillar content strategy to create a content encyclopedia for your users.

Track Your Internal Links

Tracking internal linking is similar to any other linking tracking process. Generally, the number of visitors a web page has can be tracked through Google Search Console.

However, this does not track the source of the click, therefore, use UTM tracking for the internal linking with the “utm-source =” internal linking” tag for tracking your internal links. 

This helps you figure out which links are performing well and which should be altered or moved to a more prominent location.

Apart from UTM Tracking, you can also use shortened links using Pretty links is also beneficial. You can automate the tracking features using Pretty Links. That way, you can quickly start to benefit from the insight that link tracking provides.

You can create link reports and export them for further analysis. In no time, you’ll be implementing internal links that increase your user engagement and page rankings.

Conclusion

Internal links are as important a part of SEO strategy as external links. Internal linking encourages visitors to stay on your website instead of finding the information elsewhere. Therefore, using internal links on your website improves credibility, reduces bounce rate, and on top of that it is one of Google’s ranking recommendations.

So, this post introduces you to the benefits of internal linking and offers you three tips for using this type of link effectively. Here is a small recap for you-

• Use optimized and relevant anchor text.
• Link to high-quality content.
• Track your internal links