4 Internal Linking Strategies For Optimizing Your SEO

The internal link structure of your website can have a significant impact on its overall SEO performance across several factors. You may have heard that despite its importance, internal linking can prove complicated to manage. On the other hand, you may find it to be a simple process.

The truth is, even though the process of placing internal links may look simple, the theory and best practices can be a little complicated. There is no doubt that strategically placed internal links can be a powerful SEO technique, however, especially for content marketing. 

If you are not familiar with the concept, internal links offer a means of linking your web pages to other content. They are useful to ensure that visitors and search engine bots can find the relevant content on your website. Even the links present in your menu, navigation, or post feed also act as internal links. 

In this article, we will talk about some internal linking strategies that can optimize your SEO. If you are new to this or have difficulties understanding the content of this article, we suggest that you consult SEO experts.

Professionals working at any SEO company would be able to help you formulate and execute efficient strategies to optimize your website ranking, which includes building an effective internal link structure.

Identify The Hub Pages

The first thing you should do is make a list of your hub pages to help you build topic clusters. This step will allow you to visualize a visitor’s understanding of your website architecture. 

Your hub pages will probably target broader keywords with higher search volumes instead of long-tail keywords with lesser searches. That means they are the ones responsible for driving most of the traffic to your business website and usually target your primary keywords. 

For example, if you have a business that sells refrigerators, your website page with refrigerator categories should be considered the most important one. That way, you can target a broad keyword like ‘refrigerator’ with a high monthly search volume. Moreover, the page will also be on top of the category pages with subcategories for various brands of refrigerators.

Failing to identify your hub pages and topic clusters will prevent you from identifying appropriate supporting content. 

Use Internal Links To Create Topic Clusters

You should use your internal linking strategies to map out topic clusters for relevant web pages instead of just the associated keywords. Topic clusters should begin with the main page for any particular topic so that the related pages can provide support to add more information or depth.

In turn, the related pages would be internally linked back to the hub page to emphasize their relevance to the topic. It will also demonstrate that the main hub page is the most authoritative source of information for that topic on your website. 

You can start by building out a spreadsheet for each topic cluster or hub page with subsequent supporting pages on various levels. Also, create some cross-links between the pages that belong to the same level on a topic cluster. Running a content audit can help you improve the supporting page links to strengthen your topic clusters.

Choose The Relevant Anchor Text

The next strategy would be to choose the right terms or phrases that you can use for your internal links. You may wonder if your main target keyword should always act as an anchor text for your internal links.

Manipulating anchor texts for internal links violates Google’s guidelines, but it is not the case for internal linking strategies. However, there are certain things you should consider for best results.

• You may not get penalized for using an anchor text consistently, but it may look unnatural to a reader. So, it is best if you use a variety of anchor texts without disrupting keyword optimization.

• You can use long-tail keywords to boost your target page ranking for specific terms. Make sure these terms are used by visitors for searches.

• Do not try to force an anchor text into your content for the sake of placing an internal link. Instead, try looking for natural opportunities to place internal links that do not affect topic relevance.

Identify The Authority Pages

Once you have established a strategy to create topic clusters, you should think of leveraging existing authority pages on your website. They are usually web pages that have external links pointing towards them. Make sure you evaluate the qualitative aspect of external links as well while choosing the authority pages. 

You can use a tool that analyses backlinks to identify these pages. Make sure that you check the domain authority of the external links to identify your most authoritative pages instead of just looking at the number of backlinks. 

Using these internal linking strategies can help you optimize your website SEO to increase its ranking on Google. You do not need to overthink your approach because you can control each step of the process. Make sure you use accurate data and relevant tools to plan your strategies and create your internal links to help you achieve the desired results.