For decades now, the prominence of Search Engine Optimization has gained more recognition among site owners across search engines like Google. With the number of said site owners increasing, and the population across various niches equally experiencing this increase, these numbers translate to the competition that is present across niches.
While many have devised ways such as black hat SEO to maneuver the search engine’s algorithm to get their content to the top, organic measures remain a widely recognized way to gain the trust and following of individuals interested in your content.
Among the various measures that have an impact on SEO, link building, either internal or external, is an example of those largely used by site owners. However, in this article, we’ll turn our attention to the type of link that goes on within your site. What is internal link building, and how does it have an impact on your site’s SEO?
Internal Link Building – What Is It?
Link building, in general, is the process of creating an easily accessible bridge, namely a link, between two pages. As mentioned earlier, this can either be done between a page on your site and a page on another individual's site, or between two pages on your site. As you may have guessed, the latter is what we refer to as internal link building.
Internal link building is when you place a hyperlink belonging to your “contact us” page or even another related article on your site in an article/page. But what is the use of doing that?
Key Benefits of Internal Link Building
On the end of the search engine, Google, internal links are entirely necessary for understanding how your site works. One of the ways internal links achieve this is by indicating that two or more pages contain content on the same topic.
For visitors to your site, internal links make it as easy for them to navigate your site as it would the search engine.
You can send value to a page you would want to rank the most by building links between the page of highest priority on your site to this said page. This, in turn gets users of your site to visit these pages nearly in the order you would like.
The occurrence of orphan pages can be reduced using internal links. Orphan pages are those that have no links pointing to them. They may result from pages that are newly published or among the earlier contents of your site. These pages are impossible for Google to crawl and nearly impossible for your audience to find. With help from an appropriate plugin or some backlink data from a tool like the site audit by Ahrefs, you can identify orphan pages, (if you have any) and choose to link them up or delete them.
Internal links create an avenue for you to structure your site as you envision. Making the right use of internal links is a sure way to place pages on your site in categories or any hierarchical order you would like your audience and Google to access these pages. An example of this feature of internal linkage is found widely across e-commerce websites as it helps place the individual pages of similar products under categories.
What Should Determine your Internal Linking Patterns?
As a site owner looking to implement internal link-building, you should put these three elements into consideration:
The relevance of pages on your site and how you want them to be seen.
The relationship between these pages you have on your site.
And the value of the individual pages.
Tips for a Proper Link Building Strategy
Here are a few among the several ways you as a site owner can strategically get the best out of your site's internal linkage
Do not use the same anchor text where your links between two pages appear. Doing so would convince Googlebot, and by extension Google, that it is dealing with two pages of the same content.
Fix your link in the higher part of your pages. When some individuals encounter an eye-catching redirect link before they get halfway through a page, they would click on that link, especially if it is a topic of interest. It is very likely that after viewing the linked page, they would return to finish whatever content captured their attention earlier. This all translates to more time spent on your site. Google, of course, would consider your site to have content good enough to keep your audience engaged, thereby earning you an increased SERP ranking.
Include do-follow directives to your internal links. Using an automated plugin to include no-follow tags to external links, some setting or bug could cause these no-follow tags to reflect on internal links on your page. This almost entirely defeats the purpose of having internal links as Google would no longer be able to crawl the linked page on your site. One way to avoid this is by adding do-follow tags to internal links. Note, however, that no-follow tags are counted as links by the Googlebot for which the link value is lost. To avoid this, you can cut down on the number of links present on a page. Alternatively, a no-index tag would prevent your page from being rendered on the SERP when a query is made.
Link strategically to your site's most authoritative page. Doing so would extend value/authority to the pages you have created this link with. If your homepage is your most authoritative page, as is the case for several site owners, having other pages linked to this page makes them benefit from the link value on the homepage according to the link value division done by the search engine.
Having an extra “related posts” category with links in them is another way to grant more visibility to your posts. You can do this manually or with help from a plugin.
Try internal link building manually. When you utilize plugins to do this linkage automatically, you may encounter the following
Having links placed almost randomly on your page.
Internal links that add no navigational value to pages for visitors of your site.
Repeated anchor texts across pages depending on the size of your site and the plugin in use.
Bottom Line
As we have seen, using internal links to organize pages is one way to ensure easy accessibility of on-site content. By making use of links strategically and in a decent amount, you can very much extend value to other pages on your site, attract better visibility, and improve your ranking on the search engine.