What is Internal Linking?

Internal linking is the act of linking text on a web page to another web page in your site. Adding relevant links within your text is helpful for visitors and key to your overall on-site search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. With little effort, you can leverage your more popular web pages to drive traffic to less traveled pages and improve your overall site optimization.

Why are Internal Links so Important?

• They help your visitors navigate your site more easily.
• They add “link juice” to pages on your site (link juice= ranking power).
• They assist in giving hierarchical structure to the information on your site.

In this post we will focus on internal link building to benefit your website visitors and spread your link juice. First, let’s talk about how to add a link on your site. Regardless of what content management system you are currently using, the process of adding links is pretty standard.

1. Access the administrative features of your website to choose a page where you would like to add a link.

2. Once on the chosen page, scroll down to the “page content” section.

3. Highlight the text you would like to link to.

4. Click on the hyperlink icon.

5. Insert the page URL that you would like to link to.

Three Quick Tips for Internal Links

Optimize the anchor text—When choosing the text on your page where you would like to add a link, choose text that contains targeted keywords.  Need help finding keywords for your site? Check out our blog post, A Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Research, for some helpful tips.

Add links that make sense—Be sure that the links you are adding to any given page are relevant to the information your visitors are currently viewing. For example, in the tip above, we linked to a blog about keywords in case our readers need help determining how to find relevant keywords for their website content. Makes sense, right? If we were to link to our graphic design services in this post, it would be confusing and irritating to visitors who happened to click on the link thinking it had something to do with internal linking.

Direct traffic—Do you have a page (or pages) on your site that are very important to your business, but don’t get much web traffic? Try linking those pages to some of your higher traffic pages— especially blogs, tools, or other content that has gone viral.  By taking a look at your website analytics, you can quickly determine what pages are getting the most traffic. 

Not sure if your site is properly optimized for search engines? We can help. Our search engine optimization experts in Boston can analyze your site to determine the best optimization techniques to get you noticed in SERPs (search engine results pages). Contact us today to boost your online visibility and your bottom line.