Understanding Internal Linking: A Key to SEO Success

The Writebolt chrome extension offers a powerful internal linking capability that automatically optimises the internal link structure for any web page to increase search engine optimisation (SEO) performance.

Built with a dataset that has analysed over 2 trillion links across 300 billion web pages by a team with close to two decades of SEO experience, Writebolt is a powerful internal linking solution for any website. 

The Writebolt software quickly analyses every page on your website and intelligently adds (or removes) internal links to key pages that supports the user experience.

The best links are ones that offer supporting information to website visitors, which ultimately extends their user journey on your website and increases page views. 

The Writebolt software determines optimal anchor text for every link to create a natural backlink profile – long gone are the days of stuffing keywords into backlinks.

Using AI, Writebolt will even rewrite passages of text on your website to naturally include links to your most important content, making the narrative more effective on every page.

Writebolt offers plenty more features, but inserting and optimising links is its most important feature, so it’s important to understand what internal linking is and how it works. 

 

What is Internal Linking?

Internal linking refers to the process of linking one page of a website to another page within the same website. These links are typically (read: always) embedded into text as hyperlinks, guiding visitors from one page to another relevantly and logically.

The ‘anchor text’ used for these links is often, but not always, a concise description of the target page, which serves to inform both users and search engines about the content of the link’s destination. An example of this is in the previous paragraph, where we linked to a web page about hyperlinks using the text ‘hyperlinks’.

Notice, however, that this is an external link (a link to a different website).

External links can also be an important part of your content (particularly blog content), because they provide evidence and proof towards the point you are trying to get across.

However, internal links keep people on your website, not someone else’s website, so there is an obvious advantage to internal links.

Why is Internal Linking Important?

Internal linking is critical to optimising your website for users and search engines. It is often one of the most overlooked areas of search engine optimisation, yet it is one of the most highly effective areas to improve search engine rankings.

Here’s why:

1. Internal links improve usability through easier navigation
Well-planned internal links allow users to navigate a website in a thoughtful way that expands their knowledge, which ultimately leads to a better user experience. This is essential for keeping visitors engaged and reducing bounce rates,

2. They enhance page authority and ranking power
Internal links distribute page authority and ranking power throughout the site, which can help improve the SEO performance of individual pages. By linking to less prominent pages from more powerful ones, you can elevate the SEO status of the entire site.

3. They boost your page index rate
Internal linking helps search engine crawlers find and index pages on the site. This is particularly important for ensuring that newly added content is discovered and included in search engine indexes.
There are many more reasons, but in the end it’s simply about optimising your website for search rankings and increasing page views.

How to Optimise Internal Linking

So now you know it’s important to add internal links to your content, but the question you might be asking yourself is how to do that.

On a technology level, there are lots of tools, such as Writebolt, that will do it for you.

If you have a small website, it might be simple enough to do it manually. If that is you, then consider the following factors:

• Be descriptive with your anchor text

  Ensure that the anchor text for internal links is relevant to the destination page. This not only helps with SEO but also improves the user experience by setting clear expectations about what the link is about.

• Think of links as like guide posts

  Go beyond linking to your homepage or contact page and really try to guide your website visitors to informative content. It’s valuable to link to pages that are deep within the structure of your site, by helping to direct traffic to more detailed, useful content.

• Link to content in a natural way

  Place internal links where they feel natural and make sense contextually. Forcing too many links, or placing them where they don’t logically fit, can detract from user experience and may be penalized by search engines.

• Regularly update and add new links

  As you add new content to your website, look for opportunities to create internal links from existing high-authority pages. This will help to spread newly acquired authority across your site.

• Don’t have too many links

  While it’s important to have internal links, too many on a single page can be overwhelming. Aim for a balance where the links are helpful but not cluttered.

 

If you’ve read this far, you should now have a good understanding of why internal links are important, and how to use them effectively on your website.

Check out the Writebolt chrome extension to make internal link optimisation easy