How to create an internal link structure?

Even before you plan your content to rank on Google Search Engines in 2021, most importantly it requires links. Google can easily find your posts and pages when it’s interlinked from somewhere on the web. Internal links help you in connecting your content thus giving an idea Google of the structure of your website. Interlinking can also help in establishing a hierarchy in your website thus allowing the most important pages and posts more link value when compared to the less valued pages. So, make sure you use the right interlinking strategy in order to boost your SEO.  

Almost every article that is on internal linking starts with debating on how complicated the topic is but how equally it’s important. While internal linking is one of the simpler concepts that everyone should be doing but theory, process and other best practices of internal linking can get complex. Internal linking is like being both the faces of a single coin, i.e, advanced and simple. But regardless of how complex or simple you might think the topic is, it is one of the most important aspects of your SEO. The strategic internal linking works as an SEO power technique, that too especially for content marketing.  

What is Internal Linking?

An internal linking means connecting one page of a website to several other pages of the same website. The thing to note is that the source domain and the target domain are always the same. 

Internal Linking purpose:

There are three main purposes of internal linking:

1. Interlinking helps in website navigation.

2. Helps in defining the website’s architecture and hierarchy. 

3. Helps in allocating page authority and ranking the power throughout the site. 

The best interlinking techniques for SEO

1. Creating loads of content

For you to create a lot of internal links, you must have many internal pages for the same. In order for you to have a killer internal linking strategy, you must have a killer content marketing strategy too. You cannot definitely have either of these without the other. 

For when you have loads of content, you will have loads of linkable content too. The better interlinking strategy is to have more links to more places. There are a few linking strategies that have a complex layer of pages, silos of content, and mathematics formulas. Don’t worry, it actually doesn’t matter much as internal linking wouldn’t require organizational spreadsheets and derivative charts. In this world of internal linking, there are no cycles, silos, tiers, or even structured flow diagrams. There are way too many links going to helpful places. 

2. Usage of Anchor Text

To meet up with the content theme of internal linking, your internal link should always be accompanied by anchor text as opposed to linked images. Linking an image is fine, but make sure that the images are not main source links along with the image being effectively alt-tagged. Making the proper use of anchor texts ensures the new can of worms. That’s sure that you wouldn’t be expecting optimized anchors. Make sure to use natural, unoptimized sentence fragments such as the anchor texts and you will be doing just fine. No need to do anything extra and no too much overthinking, you just need to highlight it, link it and it is done. 

 

3. Relevant links are important

As it’s really very clear that internal linking is less rigorous and scientific than many might think. Interlinking should be intentional and make sure not to link just for the sake of linking. Rather what you can do best is linking content that is relevant to the source of the context.

4. Links that are natural to the reader

While having to use Internal Linking makes sure to have a user-focused approach for the addition of value and information. The links which provide value throughout the site are a secondary thing but the major point is to provide value to the reader. The benefit of internal linking is to improve your user engagement on your site. An informative link once received by the user if truly matches the context of their search intent then they are more likely to click on that link. 

5. Have a reasonable number of interlinks

Having an interlink in your content doesn’t mean that you have tons of interlinks in the internal content. Google gives you clear instructions and makes your lives simpler. It says to keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number. But what is the reasonable number you ask? The answer to that nobody knows. Matt Cutts had once mentioned having 100 links or so. In certain situations, it might work great. So, would you go in for 100 links?  You might have it but that 100-total links should be included in your page, footer, header, ads, and everything. 

On a personal note, when it comes to internal linking, we would suggest having four to five links but it all depends on the length of your post. To be frank there’s no magic number as such. This solely depends on your user. Add on to as many links that you think are useful for your user.