How to Build an Internal Linking Strategy That Compounds

Why Internal Links are Important in SEO

Internal links are something that we often overlook. We publish, and we throw in a couple links for good measure, linking readers to relevant articles and calling it a day. Internal links help the search engines to navigate our site, understand the relationship between different topics, and highlight important pages.

We need to think about internal linking not on a page by page basis, but one that evolves as our content grows. Use the following SEO tips for improving internal linking.

1. Decide What Topics We Want Our Website to be Known For
   Before worrying about internal links, we want to decide what topics we want to be known for. These are our core topics or topic clusters. For example, on a marketing focused website, our primary topics may be SEO, email marketing, paid advertising, and content marketing, each of which can have sub topics.
   This provides us with a foundation upon which we can base our internal links.

2. Decide Which Pages are our Most Important Pages
   It's not that all pages should have the same amount of internal links pointing to them; some of our pages are more important than others.
   It's helpful to determine what we want our website to be known for and build important pages around those topics. Then, we look to supporting articles that can also link to these important pages.
   It's helpful to have important pages for areas that drive business, like service pages, product pages, and guides and then find relevant articles that can be linked to those pages.

3. Build Topic Clusters
   A popular way for building a strong foundation for internal linking is to build topic clusters.
   Essentially, this involves creating pillar pages and supporting content pages. Our pillar page for SEO, for example, might have links to our technical SEO guide, keyword research guide, link building guide, schema markup guide, and content optimization guide, all of which, in turn, link back to our pillar page when appropriate, thus improving our internal linking structure by building a group of connected resources around a certain topic.

4. Link Important Pages to Other Pages that Benefit From Their Authority
   We want to look at our most trafficked pages, the ones with the most backlinks, and the pages that are most competitive in terms of search results. We want to build internal links from these pages when possible to add their authority to other relevant pages on our site.

5. Use Descriptive Anchor Text
   When using internal links, we need to ensure that our anchor text is descriptive of the page that we're linking to. We should avoid using the same anchor text for every internal link, since that could be seen as spammy or confusing by the search engines.
   As with all anchor text, we want to make sure that readers understand where they're being sent when clicking on a link and avoid using non descriptive text, like "click here", for internal links. We shouldn't stuff our anchor text with keywords, either. Make it readable and relevant to the destination link.

6. Link New Posts to Older Posts as Soon as They're Published
   We don't want to wait for a new post to rank before giving it some much needed love and attention in the form of internal linking. When a new blog post is published, we want to look at relevant older articles and add internal links to help boost the ranking of the new post, as well as linking out to older, relevant posts.

7. Look After Orphan Pages
   An orphan page in SEO is simply a page that doesn't have any internal links pointing to it. They tend to be quite difficult to crawl and aren't easily discovered by human visitors or search engines. We can run a search on our site looking for pages with few or no internal links pointing to them and take action to either add them to our topic clusters or remove them.

8. Don't Overdo It
   Quantity doesn't always equal quality, and with internal linking, we don't want too many links on a single page. It becomes overwhelming for the reader, and it's much harder to follow the most important links.
   We want to ensure that we're only linking to pages that are relevant to the reader and the topic of the page, as well as providing value or moving the reader forward in their research. Fewer links to relevant pages will always be more effective than lots of links to pages that aren't that relevant.

9. Don't Forget to Audit Your Internal Links
   Website redesigns, migrations, rewrites of content, and the removal of pages can all affect the internal linking structure of a website. When we make structural changes to our website, we want to ensure that we're not losing or breaking any internal links. Internal linking audits should be a regular part of our SEO maintenance.

10. Keep an Eye on How Our Internal Linking Structure Grows and Evolves Over Time
    We want to make sure that our internal linking strategy is something that continues to grow and evolve. We want to keep an eye on things like pages receiving lots of internal links, important pages with no internal links, and opportunities to improve upon our topic clusters. We don't have to do this on a monthly or quarterly basis, but we should keep an eye on it and make adjustments when we see opportunities for improvement in our internal linking strategy.

Using a Generator Tool Can Help Us to Find Opportunities Faster
Coming up with hundreds of internal linking opportunities manually can be a bit of a nightmare as a website grows.

That's when a tool like an Internal Linking Structure Generator can come in handy, helping us to find related posts, link opportunities, organise topic clusters, and make improvements to our internal linking structure faster and easier.

We can utilise these opportunities as a starting point for our linking plan and then look at each opportunity to see if it provides value to the reader before publishing.
A solid internal linking structure will provide visitors with a better experience, help the search engines to understand the topics and relationships between pages on our website, and provide value for important pages that need a boost.

Implementing a few of these SEO tips for developing and maintaining an effective internal linking strategy can help to make our posts count for more and improve the overall experience for our visitors.

Written by:
Brainito Intelligence
www.brainito.com