How to use an effective internal linking strategy

Getting traffic to your blog is difficult. Keeping that traffic (people) on your blog is also difficult, but there are a few things you can do to help make that happen. The first is to write engaging content that people find useful. That will always be a winner. Another is to adopt an effective internal linking strategy.

Some of the benefits of internal linking are:

• Better search engine rankings
• More user-friendly site
• A reduction in bounce rate

What is an internal linking strategy?

It’s a way of making the most use of your own content by interlinking your posts using appropriate keywords and keyword phrases. This helps your readers find related content and it helps boost the chances of the destination pages being found in search engines for the keywords and phrases contained within the links.

This type of linking is often overlooked by bloggers and webmasters. And while the links may not have the same power as a link from an online newspaper or a popular blog such as Mashable, they do pass some link juice. Quite how much is another matter. No one really knows. Google (and other search engines) keep this kind of information top secret.

Increase usability and reduce bounce rate with internal linking

A blog can very quickly amass a huge amount of material. Say you publish two posts a day and your blog is two months old. That is at least 120 posts. Take it up to the six months stage and you are talking well over 300 posts.

Readers of your blog will find it difficult to track down all of that material. In fact, they probably won’t even look for most of it.

This is where an effective internal linking strategy comes into its own. You can lead your readers to the content that is relevant (or you want them to read) by creating direct links from within your posts. The trick is not to overdo it. Don’t feel obliged to have a link every paragraph, use the method sporadically and when it adds value to the post you are writing.

It’s all about balance.

If you create a post with 300 words it would be a bit over the top to have 10 hyperlinks among such few paragraphs. Two or three links however, is perfectly acceptable.

A couple of examples of internal linking

Here are a couple of examples of the same sentence and the approach I would take for adding an internal link to the sentence:

In example number one I have turned the three word keyword phrase I want to target, Google AdSense program, into a hyperlink. In the second example I have just used the word AdSense. Both examples should boost the destination page for the word AdSense, but I am more likely to get rankings for the first phrase as it is less competitive.

When I write a blog post I write it with one keyword phrase in mind. I write the post naturally, I don’t think about linking to related posts during the writing process.

Once the post is complete I re-read it to see if any phrases are suitable for internal linking. If there are, I create the link. If I can get away with making a slight alteration to the text to squeeze in a link, I will do so.

When creating an internal link I always use the absolute URL:

http://mydigitalinternet.com/what-is-the-google-adsense-program/

Older posts are more likely to have PageRank and will pass some of this authority onto the post(s) you link to. It is worth revisiting some of these posts to see if there are opportunities for linking to newer content, especially if you have never linked to your own posts very often, or at all. You may be pleasantly surprised at the links you can create and the amount of work (or lack of it) required to do so.

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