Your Essential Guide to Internal Content Linking

As a matter of fact, it is official. Google announced they pay attention to internal content linking. The more the links, the more the authority you add to the particular page. It's even better if it's a product or service. You are literally telling search engines that it is the centerpiece. The real question is, is there possibility of overkill. There definitely are chances, you can overdo it. Linking every page on the website to a particular page looks suspicious. The search engine algorithm wishes everything to happen naturally rather than being worked out. In this post we will look into every aspect of internal content linking for any website.

Internal linking pages are signals to search engines

Internal linking is such a powerful SEO tactic, most websites don't really use. The anchor text and linking helps put your blog content into context. The sheer number of internal linking to a page is a signal to search engines. It communicates the relative importance of that particular page to the search engines. In other words, if a less important page has plenty of internal links to it, you must reconsider the overall link structure. These were points explicitly mentioned by Google itself once upon a time. You can even find the post in the archives. There are quite a few internal link building strategies you just can't afford to miss.

It's all about revenues...

Before we dive down to it, you need to learn how to use these internal links to your advantage. Firstly, it can be used to improve search visibility. Secondly, they can also be used to boost revenues generated from the website. The latter is often ignored by SEO professionals more often than not. It is because SEO is almost always focused exclusively on improving web traffic. However, you must be using those footers and headers to drive your visitors to relevant landing pages. Besides that, it is the key to make money sites work like charm. Ultimately, any type of SEO is useless if it doesn't focus on generating revenue.

Placing internal links

You can link to any particular page via text or image link. It helps push the flow of web traffic in the most profitable route. You need to constantly ask yourself which pages offer more value in terms of conversion. Limit yourself to just the commercial value, which is often overlooked in SEO. The important pages can be anything from product page to sign up to shopping to affiliate clicks to enquiries. Also consider the range of metrics that is important to business. Without further ado we will get to the technical tips and tricks involved. After all the SEO game is a bag of tips and tricks alone.

Internal linking method #1

There are three internal linking strategies that work like charm even in 2020. Let's look at it one by one in depth and detail. Firstly comes, the quick and street smart method which can be implemented in record time. All you need to do is create a list of combination of URLs and targeted keywords. Explore the related keywords for these primary keywords. Now it's time to use a free plugin to automatically deploy all these internal links.

There are tons of plugins available on WordPress for this purpose. From our side, we suggest using the SEO Auto Linker from Christopher Davis. It must be noted that it's free and we are in no way affiliated with them. It may feel outdated in 2020, but does the job so perfectly. All you need to do is copy URLs and related keywords and paste it in the plugin page.
Set the links to 1 per page to ensure you don't end up spamming your own website. Once you are done, your link profile is immensely upgraded. Nevertheless, we our efforts don't stop just here. We are going ahead with the remaining two internal linking methods as well. We will also explain the reasons why just one method doesn't suffice.

Internal linking method #2

In the first method, you have no say in where the links are placed. The plugin decides that for you randomly. You might miss out big time on the monetizing opportunities. Before we learn to deploy linking pages with a plugin, we must be aware of the manual method. To do that you need to know how to search all your linking pages in Google. A simple search like 'site: yourdomainname.com KEYWORD' returns correct results.
The targeted keyword can be the product you are about to launch. You visit the pages in the results and look where you can place an internal link. Looks for all the relevant pages where you can add in the internal links. Use a spreadsheet to list down all the relevant URLs for any targeted keyword. The generated list can be subsequently used in method #1.

Internal linking method #3

Sometimes you published a super quality content that you want to rank as quickly as possible. In such a situation this method is just about perfect. You need to find some powerful pages on your site using backlinks. Using Ahrefs can be a great way to find them out. Choose the pages which are 'Best by Links' in the report. These are pages with high number of referring domains (RD).

Choose the pages that are relevant to the content you want to promote. Look out for all possible opportunities from the list of authority pages. With a little tweak most pages can be made relevant. Use your 'out of the box' thinking to explore all the goldmines. When you are linking from all of these authority pages, it works like a powerhouse of system in promoting your high quality content.

Summing it up...

Linking pages are valuable chains in your SEO structure. It stonewalls your web structure against weaknesses. It is in fact the most overlooked SEO tactic by webmasters. Even the webmasters who address it don't do it right. We hope this post helps you on acing the internal linking game.