Internal links are likely one of the most underused elements of on-page SEO. Aside from basic site navigation, many website owners stop there when creating internal links. Even then, they do not take full advantage of the SEO opportunities provided by their navigation links.

Internal anchor text links can go a long way to getting your site indexed for the search terms you are targeting. Although the site navigation is a part of your linking, there is much, much more you can do with links on your website to support your efforts in gaining page ranking. First, I will explain what an anchor text link is for those who are new to optimization.

An anchor text link looks like this: SEO Q&A You notice that the term “SEO Q&A” is hyper-linked to the page for the SEO Q&A content. It is placed within this article so it is considered a contextual internal link as apposed to links you would normally find in the site navigation. Using this within your blog or website content is a very powerful tool.

How Internal Links help optimize your website:

1. First, they are a benefit to your visitors as an easy way for them to find additional information on the topic they are interested in. By providing them an natural way to surf more pages of your site, they will increase your page views and decrease your site bounce rate. In turn, they improve your site performance from a search engine standpoint. Search engines like to send visitors to sites that provide the best information. One of the ways they judge if your site is relevant to a search term is by the number of pages a visitor views and the length of time they spend on your site.
2. Internal links count as back-links to the pages they are linking to. So many people spend copious amounts of time building inbound links from other sources that they do not realize you have opportunities to boost your link popularity within your own site. For example; if I want to rank for the term RSS to email I would make sure that any page containing that term would link to my page about RSS to email. The more posts or pages I create with that term as an anchor text link in the content, the more back-links I am building for my keyword.
3. Assigning importance to your most profitable pages. By using anchor text links within your content for your specific “money pages” you are telling the search engines that that page is the most important page for your search term. As a result, that money page will rank higher in the search results. Let’s say I have 20 pages of content all about RSS feeds and 19 of them have an anchor text link to the RSS to email page, then Google would recognize that out of those 20 pages, the RSS to email is the most important one and they will serve that one to the searchers first.
4. Get more pages crawled and indexed. When the search engines visit your website, they come in through whatever link happened to lead them to your site. As they crawl through the content, they follow the links and crawl those pages as well and then the links on that page, etc, etc. By having internal links in your content, you can lead the search engines through your site.
5. Funneling or creating a silo of your content. The more relevant the links are to that page’s content, the more the search engine will know that your site has a wealth of information on the topic. Otherwise, the search engine will crawl the site in chronological order. ie: your post today, the post from yesterday, the post the day before, and so on. Since you may not be posting every day on the same topic, you will dilute the effectiveness of your content. By having relevant internal links within the content, you are guiding the search engines through your pages in a way that is more search friendly. Using Related Posts links at the bottom of your post is also a great way to use internal linking to make search engines follow all of the relevant content on your site.

There are WordPress plugins that can handle these tasks automatically for you. The “Yet Another Related Posts” WordPress plugin will automatically create a list of links to related posts at the bottom of all of your blog posts. You can customize the plugin to show a specific number of posts.

SEO Smart Links is another WordPress plugin that will automate your internal anchor text links. This is a great plugin that will make internal linking hands-free. Once you have installed the WordPress plugin, all you have to do is set up the keywords and corresponding URLs in the plugin settings. Then all you have to do is remember to use those keywords in your content. Every time that keyword appears, it automatically turns it into an anchor text link for you. Anytime you want to rank for a new keyword, you just go to the settings and input the information for that term.

With both of these plugins in place, you never have to think about internal linking again. It is all done for you. That is the best kind of SEO there is!

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• internal links
• key factors on an internal company website
• seo internal links contextual vs navigation

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