Add internal links

Contributors

@brandon-leuangpaseuth @andreea-macoveiciuc-content-expert


Business Benefits

Boost content visibility by building a hierarchical content structure and distribute content authority throughout the website.


Create a spreadsheet for your website’s taxonomy and add the high-level topics that you want to own.

For example, if you run a content marketing agency, your main topics could be content marketing service, content marketing courses, content writing services, and content campaigns.

For each topic, add search queries that can help you reach your conversion goals.

Cover the different search intents when choosing your queries: informational, navigational, commercial, transactional.

For example, the first topic - content marketing service - might include subtopics such as process, price, writers, or samples.

Create or adjust your website’s information architecture to reflect your taxonomy.

For example, a hair supplies website might have these main categories: Hairbrushes, Curling Irons, Flat Irons, Blow Dryers. The first category, Hairbrushes, might include the following subcategories: Paddle, Smoothing, Detangling, and Styling.

Optimize your existing content by linking to your category pages and main subcategories, to create internal links from and to these pages.

This is a great way to improve the SEO for your site. Internally linking pages shows Google which pages are topically relevant, improves the user experience and allows people to access the information they need. If your website has many blog articles, start with a smaller scope, for example content pertaining to a category or a month.

Use tools like Ahrefs, Answer the Public or Google’s search suggestions to get ideas for topic-specific queries by analyzing questions being asked on that topic.

For example, if one of your main categories is content campaigns, you can choose queries such as:

  • How to create a campaign?
  • How to prepare it?
  • How to launch a content campaign?
  • How to create a multi-channel campaign?
  • How to measure the results?
  • How to choose campaign KPIs, and so on.

Use these queries as H2 headings when creating your blog articles to reflect your content hierarchy.

This means you shouldn’t start with an H3. Subheadings that are questions can get featured in voice search. They should feature your target keyword’s synonyms and related semantic terms.

Link to the pages to which you want to pass authority and use descriptive queries as anchor texts throughout your body content in blog articles.

For example, if you want to link to the page “How to choose campaign KPIs” from another blog article, you can use anchor texts like “tracking campaign performance”, or “choosing relevant campaign metrics”. More internal links pointing to a page shows Google that the page is important and boosts it in the rankings. A good internal link is high up on the page and above any outbound links. Add links pointing to every one of your pages, so Google can easily crawl, reach and read your pages. A page without any links is called an orphan page; these often go unindexed and hence never show up in search results.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T12:35:40Z