Many are not aware that the interlinks are one of the silent heroes for a website to rank. Google or any other search engine values blog post or a web page that has internal linking within a domain. This creates a hierarchy structure that makes the content easily accessible.
Internal links are one of the best ways to structure your website.
When you can create internal links between relevant articles, this strategy helps your visitors to understand the content better. It is one of the major ways to boost your SEO campaigns.
In this blog post, you will learn everything about internal links and how to create an interlinks strategy for SEO.
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What are internal links?
Internal links are the links that are navigating from one page to another of the same domain. Basically, internal links are represented in the form of hyperlinks that you want your readers or search engines to focus on the specific page of the website. This process is generally involved within the same website or blog.
You can add internal links in many ways. This can be done through a graphical representation, anchor text as well as you can even include it in the footer or header menu. It is basically done so that it creates and boosts the page authority of your website. As the search engine and readers find the contextual information more resourceful, you can enrich the user experience.
It is not like randomly creating an internal link between all the web pages. This can affect the SEO performance of your website. There is a proper way where you need to create an internal linking structure. You will be learning about this later in the blog. Before that, let us understand the benefits of doing internal linking.
Benefits of Interlinks
These are one of the key strategies that are used in on-page SEO optimisation. If you are positioning your web pages according to the site architecture, you can easily scale the growth of your site.
There are a lot of benefits when you interlink your blog posts or web pages. Starting from better indexability to making your content accessible. Let us understand each of their benefits.
Boosts page authority
This is one of the major factors that you are going to achieve when you use a successful interlinking strategy. Whenever you receive any traffic to your website or blog, you can distribute the traffic for the relevant web pages also. With this strategy, it doesn’t only limit itself to increasing traffic but also helps to boost the page authority score.
Page authority is one of the crucial factors to get your website ranked. In order to get a better domain authority or domain rating score, an internal linking strategy is a must. You can also easily observe a significant growth in terms of domain score metrics. There are many content publishers who have found this strategy resourceful and have successfully implemented it for other websites also.
Increase pageviews and sessions
Whenever you create an interlink within the blog post, the user tends to click it. And when they go to the other landing page which you have created, your page views get increased. This doesn’t only stop there. When your audience regularly interacts with your internal links and enjoys other web pages content, you can easily see the growth in sessions.
This is one of the most powerful strategies that you can use to increase page views and sessions of any website. It also helps your audience to stay longer, this will result in a decrease in bounce rate as well. As you all know that the 2021 trend is all about the page experience, interlinking it is one of the great ways to serve this purpose.
Increases ranking for all other web pages
When you are able to generate traffic from any of the blog posts, you can diversify it with other pages through interlinking. This not only helps to drive traffic but also improves the credibility and content authority of the web pages. This will result in ranking your other web pages on search engines as well.
You have to check the landing pages that are driving huge traffic for you, this you can either through the Analytics tool or even the Webmaster Tools. So when you go to the analytics, you can find the top-performing landing pages, and you can create interlinks within those pages. This helps to diversify the traffic as well as improve the keyword average ranking positions for other pages also.
Helps in conversion
If your website is pitching any service or a product, then the interlinking strategy is the best way to drive conversions. When you analyse the top-performing posts, you can target those posts to the relevant service or a product. With this strategy, you can drive the traffic that has rich user intent and there is a maximum possibility for them to get converted.
When you basically add interlinks between the body text of top-performing web pages, your website visitors will interact with those links. When you have proper CTAs enabled on the product or service page, then this will be the perfect way to generate leads for your business.
Improves Indexing
I know that there are a lot of content publishers who are facing the indexing issue. Worry not, as an interlinking strategy is one of the best ways to get noticed by search engines. When you create any interlinking strategy between the old pages to the newly published pages. Then there are high chances for the search engine crawler to go through the newly published pages. This will result in getting your pages indexed faster.
This will heavily influence your SEO campaigns. When you are able to get attention from the search engine crawlers, your web pages tend to get indexed faster and show up on the search engine results pages. One of the best ways to get brand visibility is through a well-planned interlinking structure.
How to create an effective SEO interlinking strategy?
Below is a step-by-step guide for you to create an effective internal linking strategy.
Analyze the structure
The first step that you need to do before creating an interlinking strategy would be to analyze your website or blog structure. So when I term the analysis part, you basically need to check the categories and the subcategories. When you can relate the differences between categories and subcategories then it will be easy for you to proceed with other steps.
Because categories act as pillars of your website. These are basically the founding stones that you need to strengthen. This can also be created through the website menu.
Focus on the content
When you are able to position your categories and subcategories of a website. The next step that you need to analyze would be the content for it. You basically need to check all the content of your website or blog whether they have been marked according to their relevant category or not.
When you can format your content according to the categories and subcategories, then the majority of the work is solved. Because the content is the only source that helps you to get traffic as well as engages your readers. You need to develop content around the categories that are relevant for your readers. This can make them access your content easily throughout the website.
Check the keyphrases
After analyzing the content concerning the categories, now it’s time to check the key phrases. The key phrases should be present in the landing page content, title and meta description. You can’t randomly select a key phrase with an irrelevant landing page URL. This affects your interlinking performance. Always ensure to choose the relevant landing page.
Analyze the anchor text which can majorly be the key phrases. Then create a report that which key phrases should link to the subsequent page. When you make a report, you get clarity for which anchor text you need to select the destination URL from the website. This will majorly boost your interlinking efforts and easily scale growth.
Create contextual links
So when you have made the report of anchor text with the relevant destination URLs. You need to build a hyperlink for the anchor text. Ensure that the topics are related and as well as the anchor texts that you are going to target.
Contextual links are basically the anchor text that is descriptive for SEO purposes. When you can include focused keywords within the anchor text, then your audience will get clarity regarding what is this context link all about.
Ensure the links open in a new tab
The main benefit of making the internal links open in a new tab would be to get better engagement. If any user clicks a link and then a new tab gets opened, it will be easy for them to toggle between the two web pages by comparing the content.
This also benefits in terms of website engagement where you can see the growth in average time spent as well as sessions.
Bridge the links between old and new pages
When you mention the new posts link on the old pages, the new pages start to get more page authority. Because whenever you publish a new page, it doesn’t automatically start ranking. But when you insert internal links for the top-performing old pages, it will be very convenient for them to access more resourceful content.
This also benefits the search engine as it can prioritize the web pages to index faster. It helps the users to access valuable content through the navigational links when you can bridge between the old pages and new pages.
Regularly audit internal links
After creating interlinks for your web pages between the categories and subcategories, you regularly need to audit those internal links. Because sometimes there might be chances for the link to be broken, and you know that search engine crawler hates broken links.
When you send your audience to the broken links, this creates a negative effect on them. This also results in increasing the bounce rate which is not a good thing. It will be ideal for you to regularly audit your interlinks every week. And ensure that all the internal links are healthy.
Image source: Seobility
FAQs of Interlinks
These are some of the frequently asked questions by the content publishers. If you have any other concerns that are not listed here, please let us know in the comment section below.
How many interlinks do I need to create on a webpage?
There is no specific answer for how many internal links can you create on a web page.
But until the internal links that you create make sense for the search engine as well as readers then there are no issues to be found. Because whenever you are creating any internal links, this should be relevant to the content that you provide. Providing irrelevant links to the content which is not related can impact your results.
Is there any tool where I can check interlinks?
Basically, there are two ways in which you can check internal links for any website.
Through the paid platform, Ahrefs or SEMrush. Best tools to check the content link opportunities within your website.
If you are preferring the free method, either you can do it manually or else you can use the help of Webmaster Tools. Through the search console, you can easily find the blog posts that have been linked internally.
Do I really need to create internal links?
Creating internal links is one of the most essential strategies during on-page SEO Optimisation. As internal links build authority around your blog posts, this will help your website to rank much better.
Google or any other search engine crawler can easily understand through the internal links that you provide. These links help to index other web pages faster and also so creates a better user experience for your website.
Should I create a no-follow link for interlinking?
You should refrain from creating no-follow links whenever you are providing value for your readers. As no-follow links discourage the search engine crawler to scan the content, your internal linking campaign goes in vain.
It is better to have a do-follow link when you create interlinks for the website. This can create better opportunities for your web pages to get accessed by the search engine crawler.
Now it’s time for you to execute interlinks
After reading this comprehensive guide of interlinks strategy, it’s your turn to execute it. To rank blog posts or any web pages is harder without creating internal links. As per the recent 2021 trends, content is the major factor that helps a website to rank. So when you are developing content that has been properly internally linked with other relevant blogs, this creates a significant impact in terms of ranking.
Even your website readers will start enjoying the content that you publish.
When you can engage with your audience better, then the results are limitless. You get better conversions, engagement rates as well as receive huge traffic.
Creating internal links is very easy to do. But doing it in the right way is important. If you follow this guide correctly then there is nothing stopping you from achieving your SEO goals.
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