Internal link building is one of the important principles in SEO that is usually taken less seriously than it deserves.
Of course, it does not mean that no one pays attention to internal link building, but the issue is that link building is not pursued in a professional and serious manner.
Sometimes, even people who are involved in content production , rely on automatic link building that exists in many content management platforms and believe that this amount can be enough to improve the position of their content on the search results page.
Definition of internal link
Before discussing the importance of internal linking in SEO, it is appropriate to examine the internal link.
Any link on your site that points to another page on your site is called an internal link.
In other words, an internal link links a page on a specific domain to another page on the same domain.
You have usually seen many examples of internal links on different sites. Links that direct you to another article on the same site.
The importance of internal linking
The first reason and in fact the philosophy of internal link building is that visitors to your site can find different content and simply move around your site.
If we want to express this issue in a more formal language, we can say that the use of internal linking is for Site Navigation.
If someone who visits the site sees an article and likes it, he should be able to find other similar and related articles. He should also be able to understand well what the general structure of your site is and what kind of content he can find in it.
Therefore, before you think about link building for SEO purposes, keep in mind that link building should be able to clarify the structure of your site and simplify the user flow. Any other goal is prioritized next.
The main function of internal linking
Leaving aside the main function of internal linking, we will come to its application in SEO .
Internal linking can increase the click depth of visitors on your site. Click-through depth is the average number of pages a visitor sees while on your site.
Click depth is one of the indicators that can signal to search engines that the audience is satisfied with being on this site and wants to read more.
Naturally, increasing the click depth means reducing the bounce rate. We know that the reduction of the bounce rate can be considered an improvement in the site’s condition if it is done in a real way and not with technical pressure and annoying the audience.
Regardless of the SEO discussion, many other evaluation systems also pay attention to click depth and consider its highness to be a positive feature for a site. Services that evaluate and compare the performance of different sites usually also announce the Page View index, which is an estimate of the audience’s click depth .
Classification of internal links
Internal links can be categorized in different ways. None of these categories are good or bad, and each can be appropriate or inappropriate depending on your content creation goals and business model.
In the following, we will examine a common type of classification:
Link to upstream content
An upstream article is a more general article of which the current article or content is considered a subset. For example, this content is a subset of content related to SEO . So linking to the first SEO article is considered a link to the upstream article.
Link to the article below
Other content that should be seen after the current content, or that are considered a subset of it, are called downstream content.
Horizontal linking
In this method of linking, you introduce another article to the audience using an internal link, which is almost the same level as the current article and related to it, and is not higher or lower.
Unrelated link
In this case, you link to an article that is not directly related to the current article and you hope that the audience will be encouraged to click on it and read it by seeing its title.
This method is usually called promotional links. Because their function is very similar to banners and advertising links that exist on other sites. Only this time, you will promote your article on one of the pages of your site with the internal link building strategy.
Suggestions about internal linking
What you will read below are points that my experience confirms the importance of paying attention to. Therefore, other people may have different experiences or add other items to the list of these recommendations.
But anyway, my suggestion based on what we have experienced in the last decade is to take the following points seriously:
Pay attention to the text of the link
When linking to a page, we also choose a sentence or phrase called Anchor Text. For example, we may link to a marketing page in a number of ways:
All three links above point to the same page. But three different Anchor Texts are used in them.
Google and other search engines, despite the fact that they use semantic algorithms and powerful semantic analysis, still pay attention to Anchor Texts as an index and the text used in linking to an article as an indication of the content of that page. Consider.
Therefore, it is appropriate to use a word or phrase that, while being clear and related to the content of the article, is also attractive to search engines.
The wrong way to link is to write: Click here to check the types of marketing on the site.
By doing this, you have not used the opportunity that you had to introduce the subject and you have described its subject only with the word here .
Attention to the visibility of the main pages
Everyone has pages on their website or blog that are important to them. pages where a specific product is sold or introduced; Or pages that, for whatever reason, are important to you to have very good SEO.
Don’t forget to link to these pages. You might even put some of them in the sidebar or below all posts.
If you haven’t done so, choose your authentic pages that rank well in the search results and put the link of your important pages in them.
The important page is not always the same as the valid page. Validity is evaluated by search engines. When search engines direct the user to a page of your content in response to a specific question, that page is valid. But the important page is the page that plays an important role in your business model and revenue model.
Attention to automatic linking
Most content management platforms have several tools for automatic link building.
For example, in WordPress, tags and categories are automatically displayed at the top or bottom of your content depending on the theme you are using, and each of them is considered an internal link.
If you also use plugins written to display related content, a few more internal links will be created on each of your pages.
These types of links are better than no internal links. But they never replace targeted link building .
You must be sure that your proposed link is worth reading and being seen, and your audience will go to it with interest and be satisfied with seeing and reading it.
Therefore, unless you have a smart suggestion engine like Amazon and big companies, it is much more professional to manually suggest suitable links to the audience.
Attention to style links
Experience has shown that when links become part of the structure of the site, they are less visible.
The regular visitors of the site get used to passing by them and their eyes will not see these links.
If a link is really going to be seen, it is better to introduce it in the form of a text with a few sentences.
Let’s see some of the simplest patterns you can use:
- If you liked this article, you may also like this article.
- If you want to know more about this, you can read the article… also read
- What you read is part of the collection of content… It was and so far a total of articles have been published about this.
It is natural that the explanation you write depends on your creativity and writing style, and most importantly, your explanation should be real, correct and useful, and the audience should trust that you really intend to help them. This is one of the places where intent really affects how Google evaluates your site!
Attention to excessive linking
The more internal linking you do, the more likely it is that one of them will be clicked. At least this is the experience that news sites seem to have reached, bombarding their audience with hundreds of links on every page.
This can probably help improve your site’s ranking. But keep in mind that improving site ranking does not necessarily mean SEO .
My experience and the numerous tests I have done have led me to the conclusion that a steady and steady flow of visitors plays an important role in improving the credibility of pages for search engines.
It will not create a stable and stable flow if everyone who reaches the page accidentally clicks on a link.
But suppose you have written an article in two parts and at the bottom of the first part, you suggest the reader to read the second part as well. By doing this, a continuous flow is created from the first page to the second, and search engines see that a significant portion of visitors, after reaching the first page from the search results page, continue to visit the second page.
This is an example of a steady flow of visitors.
In the end, I recommend that you remember not to sacrifice the strategy for anything; Including SEO.
If you have other tips and experiences about internal link building, we would be happy if you would share them with us.
