Internal links, in simple terms, is a link that goes from one page on a domain to another on the same domain. They are useful for a variety of reasons, firstly from a navigational perspective. They also help establish a hierarchy within a website and spread link equity around sites.
Internal links have a huge amount of potential to which people don’t always leverage. In this guide, I’ll be showing you five SEO tactics to maximise your internal links. From making links unique to going for engagement and extreme topical relevance.
1. Topical Relevance
The standard rule of internal linking has always been to link to topically relevant pages. But if you push to interlink to extremely relevant pages then this will give the right ranking boosts to the right pages.
There are also technical benefits to this as Google uses Topical PageRank which determines and passes more value to those topically relevant links.
2. Engagement
Always strive for engagement when adding internal links to your page. This is your opportunity to push people to different relevant areas of your site, thereby improving your engagement metrics. Links shouldn’t just be added for SEO value, if they’re working correctly your engagement should increase.
However, there are also technical reasons why you should go for engagement. User Sensitive PageRank, a patent, describes how they value links people actually click.
3. Uniqueness
Every link you add should be unique but also natural, to avoid over-optimisation its best to avoid exact match anchor text. This is seen by Google as trying to manipulate your rankings and has processes in place to detect such activity. Ratios tend to over complicate the link process all you should focus on is keeping things natural.
4. Add Context
Always add context to your links, don’t just add a link to a piece of relevant text. Google’s freshness patents discuss the amount of change to a document. What this means is, they may just ignore a simple link added if there’s no additional text or image around it. Adding context helps to draw attention and give relevance signals to Google. Therefore it’s more inclined to pass value.
5. Trim Low Value Links
For technical reasons, you may consider trimming your low-value links as a type of old PageRank sculpting. The idea of this was that the more links you included on your page, the more diluted the value google passed became. Instead, you should eliminate the low-value links so that the value isn’t spread as thin. If a link is low0value then people aren’t clicking them because they’re not relevant or engaging.
To summarise, anyone can add links to their pages but to do it properly and with value, extra thought needs to be put into it. Initially, you need to make ties between your topically relevant pages, whether you do this through engagement metrics or looking at what pages rank for keywords between position 2 and 10.
You then need to ensure engagement is at the forefront of every decision you make, as this is the real value adder. Finally, you need to naturalise the context and even consider removing some of your irrelevant links. Take a look at our SEO services or contact us to find out more about our bespoke marketing services.