Everyone with a website wants to get more traffic. Although you can use a number of SEO and social media tactics to increase your site’s visitors, one of the most underutilized is internal link building.
Creating internal links can help improve organic search results and keep readers on your site longer.
In this article, learn the importance of internal link building and how you can easily implement it now.
What is an Internal Link?
On the Internet, hyperlinks connect one piece of content to another. You click the link and are directed to another resource on the Internet.
For example, Google search is full of hyperlinks. When you perform a search, the results have hyperlinks to various websites.
Hyperlinks on your blog can be internal or external.
An internal link is a hyperlink that leads to another page on the same website or domain
On the other hand, an external link connects to another website on a different domain. While external links are an important ranking factor for SEO, you have no control over other website that link to yours.
The good news?
Internal links are easy to create, you have control over them and they matter for SEO.
Why are Internal Links Important?
Internal linking can strengthen your website in a number of ways. Check out these benefits:
1 – User Navigation
When one page on your site links to another related page, it helps users to navigate your site. You can lead users to high value content on your site.
2 – Related Content Discovery
Users can discover additional related content that they otherwise would not have found.
3 – Internal Links help with SEO
Search engines like Google crawl your website to find your content. Internal link buiding helps search engine to understand the relationship and value of content on your site.
This helps with search engine ranking and authority. It gives you a better chance to appear in search results.
4 – Decrease Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a measure of the percent of visitors who leave your site after viewing a single page. Internal links help keep visitors on your site longer as they navigate through related pages. This contributes to lowering the bounce rate on your website.
5 Best Practices for Internal Link Building
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when creating internal links on your site.
1 – Find Related Pages on your site
If you have a large website, you can easily find other pages on your site with related content. Just go to Google search and look for the related content on your site as follows:
site:yourdomain.com keyword phrase
A list will display of all the pages on your site that include the keyword phrase. Some will be a better fit than others for internal linking.
For example, there’s a big difference between a page that mentions a keyword in a small paragraph or another post whose content is focused on that keyword in a comprehensive way.
2 – Internal Linking Anchor Text
Use descriptive text in your hyperlinks. For example, if you were to link the text “click here,” to another page, that would not indicate the relevance of that page to search engines or humans.
Instead, provide anchor text that denotes relevance and indicates to a person why they should click it.
For example,
The internal link text contains a keyword phrase to a page that is focused on long tail keywords.
This is a great way to help readers get even more information about a topic and help Google better understand the related content on your site.
3 – Always Provide Value
If you can’t find related pages to link to, then don’t. There is no point in linking for no reason. Internal links should always provide value and be natural. The link text should be relevant to the destination content or it wouldn’t make sense.
4 – Internal Linking Context Matters
The context of your internal links matter. Google looks at the content around your link text as well as the link itself. Don’t add an internal link without any context within the content surrounding it.
5 – How many Internal Links per Page
There is no exact number of link on a page that lead to other pages on your site. Keep it reasonable. For example, if you have too many links, readers may get confused or lost.
Make your internal links count to keep your readers engaged.
How to Create Internal Links in WordPress
It’s very simple to add links to other posts in WordPress. Start in the WordPress post editor for the post where you want to add the link.
1. From the WordPress Visual tab, select the text that you want to use as anchor text.
2. Click the Insert/edit link in the Toolbar.
3. In the Paste URL box that appears, click the wheel to select Link options.
4. From the list of posts and pages, select the content you want to link to. You can also type a term in the search box to find only the content that contains that term.
5. Click Add Link.
That’s all there is to it.
Video: How to create hyperlinks in WordPress
Final Thoughts
Today I gave you a few tips on how to improve your website for both search engines people using internal linking strategies. When Google understands your site better as well as the relationship between pages, you have a better chance of ranking in search results which can lead to more traffic.
By helping readers navigate and discover other content on your site, you’ll also experience an increase in traffic and maybe some return visitors.
Are you already using links internally on your site or is this concept new to you?
Tell us in the comments.
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