A Guide to SEO Internal Links: Learn Better Linking Strategies

On our blog, we’ve given you dozens of ideas for SEO strategies that you can put into place to maximize your website’s potential to bring you conversions. From optimizing for Yoast to doing extensive SEO keyword research, and everything in between, they’re all useful.

But, at the core of these tactics, you’ll find that the goal for maximization of conversions is to involve the reader. The reader must have a stake in your company in order to want to do business with you, and creating loads of valuable content brought together intelligently through internal linking helps with that end goal.

SEO Internal Links can help to create that roadmap that is helpful to your reader AND for SEO visibility from Google.

Great Content is the #1 SEO Strategy, SEO Internal Links may be #2

If you put one SEO tactic into place today, make it a point to beginning creating content that’s useful for your reader. Then, tomorrow or as soon as you have a good amount of content to make up a nice collection of web pages, focus on internal linking.

Bringing your website’s pages together through internal links guides the reader logically from one topic to the next, and it offers more depth to your specific subject matter. If you don’t understand the concept of internal linking, think about the strategy as similar to roads linking towns together.

Sure, you can find something useful in a single town. But, having access to a path to a new town, with fresh ideas and things to discover there, makes discovery and exploration of an area all the better.

Consider a town with some services that links easily to another town with some services, and think about how you might be less likely to want to escape the area altogether for somewhere better and more exciting if you have a range of helpful options available to you within a reasonable distance.

You might stick around for a bit and not reach for more thrilling horizons, because maybe there won’t be any. This is what internal linking does.

Linking offers more options for your reader in terms of valuable content, so there’s not much need to jet off to someone else’s website.

SEO Internal Links Guide the Reader Through Your Content

You likely already have internal links on your site. Your home page probably leads to more pages, each perhaps addressing a different topic, subject, service, etc. But, often a company’s internal links stop there.

This is a shame, because there’s so much potential for guiding a reader to learn more about your business, your services, your industry, and your value as a brand through linking to pages and pages of great content.

Remember the content hubs we talked about on our blog and all of the possible valuable content you can create using the content hub marketing strategy?

When you put this SEO tactic into place, your pages and pages of excellent content should all flow from one to the other through internal linking and ideally provide the reader with everything there is to know about what you sell.

When you have a blog post on your website, it makes sense to include SEO internal links on the post to other posts you’ve written. Ones that offer more in-depth discussions on topics mentioned quickly, for reasons that have to do with the benefit of the reader and SEO strategy (it may not be good SEO practice to have 2,000-word blog posts).

Say you have a guide on your website, maybe a travel guide. It’s good for SEO to link to other pages on your site that could further flesh out your guide, like links to pages of specific restaurants from a page that summarizes restaurants in a city.

SEO Internal Links Tips and Strategies

Internal linking helps the reader make better sense of the topic you are supposed to be an expert at. And, it helps you rank better as Google’s bots love internal links (as long as they’re relevant and useful to the reader, and not spammy links).

After reading just a bit of this post, you may agree that linking your web pages together makes good SEO sense. But, you might not have a clue how to go about setting up links so they help your reader and help you.

You may want to push yourself higher up in search results, but wanting and doing are different things. It’s okay if you know where you want to go but don’t know how to get there. That’s what we’re here for.

How Many SEO Internal Links Should You Have?

There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding how many internal links you should have on your website. Best practices offer that you should focus on having more than enough links, rather than not enough. Some of the most successful bloggers link internally up to 15 times, in just one 2,000-word post.

Of course, these are all relevant links to the reader and they help keep the reader engaged in the website. Quality links that offer more value boost your SEO results and they build trust with your audience. It’s worth mentioning that in order to internal link 15 times in every post, you have to have a lot of great content on your site to direct people to.

What Not to Do When it Comes to SEO Internal Linking

Creating a huge footer of internal links, known as “keyword links,” in the footer of a website is one of the worst internal linking strategies we’ve seen. These links aren’t useful. They’re simply spammy. Internal linking like this may have worked 5 years ago, but you’ll probably get penalized for them now, especially with Google’s recent unconfirmed FRED update.

Creating SEO Internal Links That Matter

Since SEO is an ever-changing beast, it can be difficult to keep up with trends and best practices. But through the ebbs and flows of SEO during the last decade or so, one thing that’s been consistent is the idea that internal linking to relevant content works. It offers the reader an excellent UX, making your site easy to navigate and enjoy.

And, we know Google rewards those who engage the reader with enjoyable content.

In addition, when Google’s bots crawl websites and sift through content, they index them. Websites that don’t have a good SEO internal linking structure are harder for Google to sort through, which means these sites don’t rank well and some pages might not even be discovered.

Do Google and yourself a favor by linking your pages to each other in a well-thought-out way. You might just earn some backlinks in the process, as the highest high-quality backlinks are typically to deep pages in a website.

If you’re lacking a strong SEO internal linking structure, Galileo Tech Media can help. We offer managed SEO services that guide companies toward developing a plan to boost readership, propel to the top of the SERPs, and in the end get the conversions they’re after.