An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Both your users and search engines use links to find content on your website. Your users use links to navigate through your site and to find the content they want to find. Search engines also use links to navigate your site.
Internal linking is something you control as a site owner. With the right internal links, you’ll guide your visitors and Google to your most important pages.
Setting up an internal linking strategy
If you want to set up your internal linking strategy, there are several things to take into account. The process of doing so will depend on your site and your goals, of course, but taking the following steps is a good rule of thumb.
1. Determine the ideal structure for your site
Imagine your website to be like a pyramid. On top of it is your homepage, below that there are some categories, and further down there are individual posts and pages.
2. Decide what your most important content is
Then, you should determine what your most important content is.
In other words, it’s your most important content. It’s about the heart of your business. It’s the content you want people to find when they search for topics or products that you specialize in.
3. Add contextual links
When you write multiple articles about the same topic, link them together to show Google and users that they’re related. You can link directly from sentences in your copy or add links at the end of your post.
4. Link hierarchical pages
If you have hierarchical pages on your website, link parent pages to its child pages and vice versa. Also, don’t forget to link sibling pages to each other. On a well-organised site these pages should be related and linking them like this will make perfect sense.
5. Consider adding a related post section
There are many plugins and modules that add complete related posts sections to your posts. If you use one, we recommend testing whether the related posts actually are related posts. If you’re not sure, linking to posts manually is probably best.
6. Try adding navigational links
Besides linking from topically-related posts and pages, it’s possible to make your cornerstone content more authoritative by adding links to it from the homepage or the top navigation. You should do this with the posts and pages that are most important to your business.
7. Add links to your taxonomies
If you have a blog it could be beneficial to add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to. Adding links to the category and tags helps Google to understand the structure of your blog and helps visitors to more easily navigate to related posts.
8. Consider adding links to popular or recent posts
The last option to mention is creating internal links to the most popular or newest posts on your website. Preferably create these sections in the sidebar or the footer of your website to have them appear on all pages and posts.
