Strategic internal linking is an SEO power technique, especially for content marketing. To set up your internal linking strategy, there are several things to take into account. How you go about it exactly, of course, depends on your site and your goals, but the following steps, from online pokies real money Australia, are a good rule of thumb.
- Determine the ideal structure for your site
We always advise website owners to imagine their website as a pyramid. On top of it is your homepage; below that there are some sections or categories, and further down, there are individual posts and pages (possibly with subcategories in between). If you do it well, your website’s menu should reflect this structure
- Decide what your most important content is
Then, you should determine what your most important content is. If you’re not sure, please read our article on cornerstone content. In short, it’s your best and most complete content; it’s about the core of your business. It’s the content you want people to find when searching for topics or products you specialize in. Because you want to let Google know that this is your most important content, you need to add many links to it. There are various spots from where you can link to your cornerstone content.
- Add contextual links
When you’ve written various articles about a certain topic you should link them with each other. This will show Google – and users! – that those articles are topically related. You can link directly from sentences in your copy or add links at the end of your post. Moreover, you want to show Google which articles are your cornerstone: your most complete article on this topic. You have to add a link to the cornerstone in all of the articles on this topic to do so. And don’t forget to link back from the cornerstone to the individual posts.
- Link hierarchical pages
If you have hierarchical pages on your website, link parent pages to their child pages and vice versa. Also, don’t forget to link sibling pages to each other. These pages should be related on a well-organized site, and connecting them like this will make perfect sense.
- Consider adding a related post section
There are many plugins and modules that add complete related posts sections to your posts. If you use one, we recommend testing whether the related posts actually are related posts. If you’re not sure, linking to posts manually is probably best.
- Try adding navigational links
Besides linking from topically-related posts and pages, it’s possible to make your cornerstone content more authoritative by adding links to it from the homepage or the top navigation. You should do this with the posts and pages that are most important to your business. This will give these posts or pages a lot of link value and makes them stronger in Google’s eyes. Navigational links like rivernilecasino.com, to connect to your pages.
- Add links to your taxonomies
Taxonomies, like categories and tags, help you organize your site and help users and Google to understand what your content is about. If you have a blog it could be beneficial to add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to. Adding links to the category and tags helps Google understand your blog’s structure and helps visitors to navigate to related posts more easily.
- Consider adding links to popular or recent posts
The last option to mention is creating internal links to your website’s most popular or newest posts. Preferably create these sections in the sidebar or the footer of your website to have them appear on all pages and posts. As link value passes to these most popular/recent posts from many different pages, they get a boost. Besides that, the posts will be easier for visitors to access, which will increase traffic – and more traffic is a positive sign to Google.
