What is the best way to implement internal linking for SEO?
“Internal links are one of the most powerful levers you can push to grow your organic traffic.” – Kevin Indig.
Internal links are links from one page to another page on your website.
Internal links help:
? People discover content that supports or adds to what they’re currently reading.
? Search engines to crawl your website.
? Distribute PageRank across your website.
This last concept, PageRank, is crucial to optimizing your internal linking.
PageRank is a metric which assesses the quality of a page based on the relevance and authority of the links pointing to it.
Internal Linking Best Practices
When creating an internal linking campaign for a website, it is important to understand best practices for implementing internal links for Search Engine Optimization.
- Internal links are links from one page on your website to another page on your website.
- Internal links help search engines to better understand the topic of the page being linked to and inform which keyword it may be relevant for.
- Internal link anchor text should be highly descriptive for this reason with a focus on keywords.
How To Audit Your Internal Links
You will need all the pages on your website and the links coming to and from those pages.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider will give you exactly this:
? Add your website into Screaming Frog. Go to Internal > HTML and click “Export” to get a list of your pages and their internal links.
? Add your website into Ahrefs or SEMRush to get backlinks and referring domains for all your pages.
Now, you can understand the flow of PageRank throughout your website, so you can channel it towards your most profitable pages.
You can add these sheets into my template below to combine the data into one sheet for your internal link audit.
PS – To get backlink data on Ahrefs, go to Best By Links under Pages. With SEMRush, go to Backlink Analytics > Indexed Pages.
How To Discover Internal Linking Opportunities (The Why)
“Build internal links from the most LINKED TO and read pages, but ensure it’s natural and relevant. Does it help the user, if yes, internally link.” – Carrie Rose
The final step is to analyze this data to discover opportunities.
Our goal is to find:
? Pages with a lot of internal links that don’t link out much.
? Pages with few incoming links that link out a lot.
? Pages with backlinks that don’t link out much.
We can discover these pages by organizing our sheet!
Organize the “Delta” column by largest to smallest to find pages with internal links that don’t link out much. Organize it by smallest to largest to find pages with few incoming links.
Organize by highest referring domains to discover pages with a lot of incoming external links that you can build rank-pushing links on.
How To Implement Internal Links (The How)
The last step is to add and remove links to create a flow of link equity going through the website to conversion pages.
?Add internal links on pages with a lot of internal links that don’t link out a lot.
?Add internal links to pages with few incoming links to improve the flow of link equity.
?Add internal links on pages with a lot of incoming links for a strong boost in rankings.
?Add internal links to pages with a lot of referring domain for a strong boost in rankings.
Watch the video below to see this in action on three different sites using this (TIPR) method developed by Kevin Indig.
