Best Tips to Use Internal Linking on Your Site

1. Keep Your Internal Links Content Heavy

If you write a 4,000-word post about how to use Instagram for marketing, you don’t want to waste your internal links on content-light pages like contact us.

Instead, seek to link from content-dense pages to content-dense pages. Think of it like, what would work best for my reader, if they needed more information on this topic? It’s that simple.

So, for example, you could use your Instagram marketing guide to link out to other internal articles about topics like optimizing your Instagram profile, how to research the correct hashtags for your company, or which social media management apps are best. Each of these pages is content-dense, and will add rather than subtract value in the reader experience.

When you link to text-light pages, you’re essentially wasting your internal link juice. Keep it relevant and productive by saving those valuable internal links for the pages that matter and will add value to your content, not the ones your readers could easily find on their own.

2. Make Your Anchor Text Descriptive

Say you’re going to link to a HubSpot report on the best marketing practices.

While anchor text is critical to improving the value of your links, not all anchor text is created equal. For best results, you want to use anchor text that describes what the link points to or is branded (meaning it mentions your company by name). This helps readers immediately understand where the link goes, and decide whether to click it.

To take your internal links a step further, make sure you’re not linking to more than about five words at a time since entire linked sentences are unwieldy and confusing.

3. Audit and Update Internal Links

As you continue creating content, some of your internal links are going to get old and outdated.

For best results, go back into your old articles and bring them up-to-date with more current internal links on a scheduled basis. This serves two distinct purposes: on the one hand, it provides more current value to your readers and ensures that your internal links aren’t taking them to useless content. On the other, it gives Google the chance to crawl the content again, index it again, and increase its rankings in Google’s SERPs.

When you go back and update your posts, follow these guidelines:

Explain the Updates: To let your readers know that an old post is still relevant, add a snippet of txt at the top of the post explaining the updates and stating when they were made.

Update all Outdated Information: If the old post contains outdated information, add to or subtract from the content to ensure it’s current. Adding new internal links won’t do much for your material if the information contained within it is still wrong.

Add Links to Your Most Recent Content: The more current your internal links can be, the better. This will help improve the ranking value of old content and help your brand-new pages get more established.

4. Link to Several Internal Pages in Every Post

Neil Patel recommends linking to at least four old articles in every new post you write. This improves the freshness value of your content and helps improve the chances that content will rank well in the SERPs.

By adding fresh links, and plenty of them, you help enhance your existing internal link strategy and improve the overall value of your content.

5. Keep Your Links Logical

No matter what you do, you don’t want to go overboard with your links. In addition to seeming spammy, this will fatigue your readers and make them less likely to click your internal links, hamstringing the entire link strategy. Instead of just popping a link in any old place, keep them in logical places that add value.

Only add links in places where they will genuinely benefit your users, and where people are likely to want more information. This keeps the links helpful and increases the likelihood that people will click.

The Case for Great Internal Links

By linking content-dense pages of your site to relevant, new pages (blogs, internal articles, resources, etc.), you can enhance the value of your content and make it easier for your valued readers to jump from place to place.

This significantly benefits your visitors experiences and makes it easier for your content to rank high up in the SERPS – win, win!