How Internal Link Building Can Get You More Search Engine Traffic

If you want your website to rank well, it needs to have links.

Not just backlinks either, which are other websites linking back to yours.

Everywhere I look I see articles popping up talking about the importance of getting backlinks, and from what I can tell, this seems to be the sole thing most webmasters focus on.

Don’t get me wrong, getting links from other websites is critical to a good ranking, but if you want to do even better, you also need to have an effective internal linking strategy.

Having a good link building strategy is difficult, you don’t have control over what webmaster’s do on their websites, but, you do have control over your own.

So what is an internal link? Well, just to clarify, and internal link are links that link two pages on the same domain together.

These links have multiple benefits, and serve a few different purposes.

Most importantly, they are what give your website structure. In order to navigate a website, you need links connecting all of the webpages together. Link structure also creates a hierarchy, sorting content into different categories, and setting a home page with other pages linking from it.

This hierarchy also spreads ranking power and page authority (also known as “link juice”) around your website.

Sure, this concept may seem simple to you, and, on the surface it is. However, just because your site has internal links, doesn’t mean you’ll automatically benefit from higher search rankings with them.

And that’d why I’ve created this article. Let’s  look at internal linking from an SEO perspective, and get into the proper way to apply internal linking to maximum effect.

Define your site structure

Your pages and your content need to have a logical hierarchy. Otherwise, your pages and content will look unrelated in the eyes of Google.

Search engines look at your site structure to determine how relevant your content is, and you don’t want to be producing great content that is downgraded just because it doesn’t link well with the rest of your website.

Have your blog and your content be as few clicks away from your home page as possible. Really your blog should be one click away, and articles just two.

Anything else on your site should be as little as three clicks away at most.

Keep producing content

Always product high-quality content on a regular basis to be seen as relevant and authorative by Google and other search engines.

Not onlt are you producing new linkable pages, but you’re also showing Google your content is up to date.

Beyond this, always update old articles to preserve or increase their rankings. I always change or append articles that are more than 6 months old to preserve their link juice.

You want as many links on your site as possible and new posts and pages allow you to create more.

Link to external websites with authority, and also link to pages or posts within your own site that may be relevant to the article.

Great content to produce are:

• Blog posts
• Photos
• Videos
• “How to” guides
• and infographics

Keep your links relevant

Don’t link randomly just for the sake of creating a link. Google’s algorithms are advanced enough to spot it. If you’re writing an article about motorcycles, it wouldn’t make sense to link to an article about aeroplanes would it?

Instead if your article is about the best tracks to take your motorcycle too, a relevant article may be the best protective gear to wear when going off-road.

Conclusion

Don’t just put internal links on your webpage for no reason. Linking relevant information on your webpages will always be good in the eyes of Google, but webpages that look scattered are not going to look well.

Well organized websites are also favoured by Google and other search engines. Internal linking helps with website navigation and not keeping your content too many clicks away.

But your internal linking is only as good as your content. Regularly produce high-quality content so that your site not only looks well organized, but also up to date and one of the best authority sites Google would want to send its traffic too.