What are internal links and why are they important?
Internal links are anchor texts, photos, or video thumbnails on your website that lead to another page on your website. These links are important for two reasons:
- They keep your visitor inside your website
- They tell Google that your website’s content is related to each other
If these two conditions are met, your website traffic is going to snowball. If a person stays on your website and reads several items for a while, Google would know it.
While your site visitor is enjoying your content, the Google algorithm would think that you are adding value, and rank you higher in the search engine results.
Today, you will learn how to build internal links visitors and search engines will love. The steps are:
- Create Categories
- Avoid Orphan Pages
- Link Related Content
- Use Relevant Anchor Text
- Link to Older Posts
- Create a Resource Page
All of these fulfill the two important reasons for link building. Let me show you how to do it and how these tips get the job done.
Create Categories
A category is an organized space where blog posts of similar nature belong. If you have a body-building website, you can create categories like Abs, Chest, Legs, etc.
In the Abs category, a visitor would find everything he has to know about developing his abs. Why is this important for the site visitor?
Not everyone who wants to exercise wants a complete workout. Some people just want to build their abs. If your blog has a category for abs, it works as a magnet for these people.
What they would do is to click on that category, expecting to find a lot of helpful information about one specific type of workout: developing their abs.
Site visitors love categories because categories make your site easy to navigate. If you have no blog categories, all your posts would be like an alphabet soup. It’d be difficult for site visitors to find what they are looking for, and they would leave your website.
Avoid Orphan Pages
What is an orphan page?
An orphan page is a page on your blog post where nothing links to it. If this happens, then Google may not know that the page exists, because no link is pointing to it. Also, your site visitors will not likely find it if the orphaned page is already buried deep among your other posts.
An orphaned page has no negative impact on your seo. The thing is, an orphaned page is not helping your SEO, either. It is like a burden on your site. If nobody finds it, then you are missing out on an opportunity for web traffic and site visitor retention.
To avoid having an orphaned page, you must have a spreadsheet of every blog post that you posted, and list if there are other posts that link to it. This spreadsheet is going to serve as your tracker where you list down which blogs link out to what pages.
Link Related Content
Related content is a blog post that has something to do with the current one that the site visitor is reading. Let us say that you posted a blog about ‘Five Complete Body Workouts You Can Do Every Day’.
Somewhere in that post, you may have offered an exercise activity about abs. In that case, that part of the content about abs must link to the Abs Category or a specific post about building abs.
What does this do?
It tells a reader that “Hey if you want more of this topic, I have something to offer!”
If you do not do this, the reader would not have known, and Google would not have known that these posts are related.
Use Relevant Anchor Text
An anchor text is a word or a phrase where you insert the hyperlink. It has to be placed naturally, or Google and your site visitor would find it weird.
Take a look at this sentence:
“I started building my abs back in college.”
If I have a blog post about “7 Tips to Build Your Abs”, then I would take that link and insert it in the phrase “building my abs”.
The phrase “building my abs” would be colored differently on your blog (blue is mostly used for hyperlinks) and your reader would know. Now that he knows that the link is about building abs, he may click on this link now or do it later after reading the full post.
How does this help?
It makes your site visitor stay. If he liked your article, he would think that the other article about “building my abs” would also be a great read. If he clicks that, then you just built for yourself one important thing that a blogger needs: credibility.
Link to Older Posts
Older posts get buried deep among your blog posts. Also, many blog platforms now will not allow you to change the date of when the original blog was posted.
Over time, Google would see these blogs as less relevant than what they used to be, especially for content that is not evergreen.
As a result, the old post would not get ranked anymore as high as it did before. To mitigate this, you have to link to the old posts through your new posts.
If you do this, you are driving traffic even to old posts, and you are improving the relevance of the old posts in the present time. Google would know this, and Google would increase the index power of the old posts.
Why? Because newer ones are still referring site visitors to it.
Create a Resource Page
A resource page is a dedicated page where you offer solutions, tools, services, or products that you recommend. It is a page where a site visitor can view the products you recommend.
All of your blog posts must link to this page. Why? Because people love being pointed to a solutions page. As you can see, people read blogs because they have a problem. Your blog post happens to offer enlightenment about that problem.
For example, your blog post shows how to increase muscle mass for the biceps. While this is helpful, your customer is also aware that he needs dumbbells to get this exercise done.
So where is he going to find one?
This is where your resource page comes in. On this resource page, you can show images of your recommended dumbbells and where to buy them. It can be your product, or it can be someone else’s product where you get a commission through an affiliate program.
readers love this because they no longer have to research on their own. You already pointed them in the right direction.
Summary
Internal link building helps your blog in two ways:
- It makes it easier for users to navigate your site
- It helps Google index your page
These two things allow Google to decide whether your blog is adding value or not. If your site visitors spend more time on your blog, and if your posts have relevance to each other, Google would tag your site as a valuable content source for your niche, therefore increasing your page rank.
Follow these tips on how to build internal links visitors and search engines will love. You would be amazed at how easy it would be to increase your blog traffic.
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