A Best Guide to Building a Internal Links Strategy that Works

To Start, we must first understand what internal linking is?

Internal links are those that point from one page to another on your site. We can become so focused on building natural links from external sources that we neglect internal improvements.

Using optimized internal links is a surefire way of allowing Google to regularly discover relevant content on your site. An additional benefit here is that internal links can help to demonstrate the contextual relationship between two pages. When you use internal links correctly, it sends a signal that page a is related to page b.

Internal Links Pass Authority

The right internal linking strategy helps to pass authority between pages on your site and ultimately improve rankings. Google officially killed the PageRank Toolbar in 2016 and stopped updating the public-facing scores many years beforehand. It is still, however, very much part of the ranking algorithm, so understanding how it works helps to map out a solid internal linking strategy. Identifying these kinds of ‘power pages’ can help you make the most of the authority coming into your site to improve rankings - we’ll look into this later, too.

Internal Links Help Users to Navigate Between Relevant Pages

From increasing average time-on-site to nudging users down the paths to purchase, internal links can be leveraged to improve your UX and, in turn, your overall search performance.

Navigational Internal Links

Navigational links typically make up a website’s main navigational structure.

Contextual internal links within Body Copy

There is a very good chance unless you are working on a completely new website, that there is at least some degree of internal linking already in place, even if it lacks strategic thinking. You need to know where you stand before you make key decisions on your new internal linking strategy.

It is categorized into five main sections

This can help you identify the most authoritative pages on your site. The report is designed to give you insights into your current internal linking structure so you can plan a robust strategy.

Too Much On-page Internal Linking

There is no specific rule on how many on-page links Google will crawl these days, but webmasters need to be mindful of overloading pages from a usability perspective.

Orphaned Sitemap Pages

If it should not exist or be ranked by search engines, consider either removing it, or adding a «noindex» tag.

Pages with Only One Internal Link

As we’ve discussed above, you should be internally linking to key pages from other relevant content as much as it’s naturally possible to do so.

Links on HTTPS Pages Lead to HTTP pages

Your audit will show you where you can resolve existing issues with internal linking. Your strategy will help you build on that to deliver business-changing results with your website.

Identifying Your Site’s Hub Pages

Hub pages often target broad keywords with high search volumes, rather than more specific long-tail keywords that receive fewer monthly searches. They’re also often the ones that drive the most valuable traffic to you as a business, which means they will typically target your main keywords with the best content. It targets a broad keyword with a monthly search volume of 246,000 in the UK alone. If a page’s target keywords have value to you, you need to be considering this in your internal linking strategy.

Compile yourself a list of your most important pages, unless you have already identified them via the likes of keyword research and content strategy development. « If the page you’re working on explores a very narrow topic in great depth, it’s not a hub page. If the page you’re working on touches on many aspects of a broad topic, it’s probably a hub page».

Creating Topic Clusters Using Internal Links

An internal linking project that maps out topic clusters of relevant pages is a fantastic way to generate positive results.

Topic Cluster Plan

Once you have filled this out for yourself, you can build your topic cluster through internal linking. Com/topic/ While this does work and is often the preferred way to structure a silo, you can still achieve a topic cluster without following this URL structure.

These are contextual links that naturally make sense within the flow of the page. Take note of these as you build your own topic cluster.

CCJ-IVA cross-linking

Once you have completed these first two steps, you will understand how to check internal links and be able to map out how you will use them to create topic clusters.

There are a few things to consider here for the best results

Try to diversify your anchor texts where possible, but not so much that it detracts from your efforts to optimize for certain keywords.

« If you have got an anchor text and you are just using the same one over and over again, you might think that the signal is a positive one. So you might want to use four or five different variants of that particular anchor text». Take the time to carefully plan how you are going to use the anchor text of internal links to your advantage. It is an effective way to indicate the topical relevance and the contextual connection between two pages.

You have got full control of the anchor text used on every internal link on your site, so be sure to use it in a way that properly indicates the topics of the target pages.

Identifying Your Site’s Authority Pages

Now that we’ve established a process for topic clusters, it’s time to move onto how you can leverage any existing authority within your site. Some pages ultimately have more authority than others and you can use them to your advantage.

Using Internal Links to Increase the Ranking of Target Pages

This part of the strategy can be as simple as working through your most authoritative pages and identifying opportunities to pass link authority onto others where appropriate. All you need to do is work through the pages with the most valuable links and identify relevant opportunities to link to your most important pages or those which need a boost in rankings. Create that content from scratch instead, if it makes sense to do so as part of your wider content strategy.

Using Internal Links to Optimize Fresh Content

This will mean consulting a list of authoritative pages to identify opportunities for relevant interlinking to benefit your search performance. These approaches can help to boost your internal linking by ensuring more pages benefit from shared authority. These should come from an authority page as well as from those within the relevant topic cluster.

If creating engaging assets to earn external links is part of your overall marketing mix, you can use them to improve your internal linking, too.

Go Compare Digital PR campaign

It pays to be mindful of this when you are creating your internal linking strategy.

Creating a Simple Strategy that Works

Solid internal linking strategy can help your content rank higher on Google, whether it is new or old.

This is just a quick summary I hope it makes sense....