How to Build an Effective Internal Linking Strategy in 2021

Links are the fundamentals of creating online content. You need internal links to help search engines find your content. Additionally, internal links give the search engines hints to figure out the main structure of your content. You can depict the hierarchy of your site by developing internal linking strategy and prioritizing your most important pages. Then, employing internal linking can improve the SEO of your website to a great degree. 

An internal link is a link from one page to another on your website. In other words, internal links are not linking another website to yours, they are connecting your own pages. The significance of internal links for search engines is that through them they can go to your other pages and find and index them. For users on the other hand, internal links are like leads to other useful content on your site.

The importance of internal links is that they determine the value of a page. The more links the pages receive internally, the more value they will have in the eye of the search engines. 

Benefits of Internal Links

Google employs robots or crawlers for finding and indexing the webpages. When a crawler reaches a site, it starts looking for links and by following the links it goes to other pages on that site. Also, the crawlers recognize the relation between the pages by analyzing how they are connected by internal links. 

Usually, the home page on any website receives the greatest number of internal links and consequently has the highest link value. Then, the link value or link juice will be divided between all the links present on the page. 

By now you must have understood that internal linking will help you create your site structure as well as distribute the link juice. Let’s take a better look at the benefits of internal linking:

1- Higher Conversion Rate

During the time your audience are interacting with your content, if they see that related topics are linked to that page, they may find them intriguing and go to other pages as well. As a result, their presence time on your website will increase and naturally, it will enhance your conversion rate. 

2- Distribution of Link Juice

Any page with a high rank that gets valuable backlinks can be linked to other pages internally and this can divide the link juice between them, so the authority of those pages will boost too.

3- Lower Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors that leave your site without visiting any page. If your content is not engaging, the audience have no reason to stay. Internal linking is one of the techniques that can be used to get more visitors with longer dwell time. 

4- Higher Ranking

When the crawlers come to one of the pages on your site, they begin to search for links in order to find other pages. If you include a reasonable number of internal links on the pages, they will find other pages as well and this will help you get indexed sooner and get higher ranking.

What is link juice (link value)?

Link juice is the value of the backlinks you get from other sites. The number of the backlinks, their being exclusive and being do-follow determine the value you get. However, the importance of link juice for internal linking is that they will spread the link juice your page has received to other pages through internal links. This fact accentuates the priority of getting backlinks for your pages 

What is Internal Linking Structure?

As mentioned before, Google and other search engines index what they can find. Therefore, having a balanced linking structure is imperative. It is only when you establish a structure that you can make sure no page is left unnoticed. By developing a well-thought-out organization for your internal links, you can decide which pages to put first and which ones to deemphasize. You can simply consult with local SEO Melbourne in order to get the best ideas for establishing an internal linking structure. 

Best Internal Linking Practices You Can Follow in 2021

1- Create as Much Content as Possible

By creating lots of content on your website, you will find a plethora of opportunities to create internal links and won’t need to cling to techniques like Silo to make an internal linking map. There is an old saying in the field of digital marketing: “content is king.” This golden rule is still in place and search engine algorithms are to a great extent sensitive to it. So, consider high quality content production your number one priority. 

2- Link High Authority Pages to New Ones

You can figure out what pages on your website possess the highest authority. Tools like Ahrefs can come to your help to detect your top pages. Authority Transfer is a successful technique through which you can improve the authority of your new pages by linking them to the top ones. 

3- Use Your Keywords as Anchor Text

Every site owner who follows an SEO strategy, most definitely likes to rank for a couple of keywords in search engines. One easy way to do that is using your target keywords as anchor texts for your internal links. 

4- Don’t Stuff Your Content with Too Many Links

Do not fill your content with too great a number of links that make it look unnatural. Usually, for 1500 words, 5 links maximum would suffice. If the number exceeds the norms, there is a danger Google ignores the content.

5- Don’t Use Same Anchor Texts for Different Pages

Including similar anchor texts on two or more pages of your website may confuse the search engines and they may conclude that the contents are duplicate. As a result, they may ignore the pages and stop indexing them.

6- Be Relevant 

As mentioned before, internal linking is important for engaging both Google and the audience. Thus, if you link one page to another irrelevantly, you only create confusion for the users and the search engines. You need to do internal linking smartly and moderately for getting the best results.  

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