The ultimate internal linking guide for SMEs and SEOs
Martin Hayman, Co-Founder of Twylu, an internal linking tool, commented: “It’s no secret that content is still king when it comes to optimising websites and pages for search engines. Every content marketer knows this all too well and that high-quality content is essential to drive visitors in today’s online world. However, relying on content alone is not enough. Using internal links is also necessary to support your SEO to drive traffic to your pages.
“Internal linking is arguably the quickest win in SEO. Back in 2019, we were conducting a lot of time-consuming internal link audits for our clients (crawling websites, downloading link profiles, and then cross-referencing the data), so we came up with the idea of making the internal link auditing process more efficient, which lead to Twylu being born.
"Unfortunately, internal links are among the most neglected techniques in link building and SEO in general. Everyone is so quick to depend on tactics that help build external links, that they quickly underestimate the importance of optimising internally”.
In light of this, Twylu has released its 'ultimate internal linking guide'. A few of the main inclusions cover what internal links are, the importance of internal links, the process of optimising internal links, and other reminders and tips to consider in your internal linking strategy:
Importance of internal links
- Give context to users and search engines
- Can help UX and conversion rate
- Can affect how often pages get crawled
- Signal importance of individual pages
- Can help with the flow of PageRank
Process (how)
- Issues
- Audit (broken internal links, internal redirects, orphaned pages, duplicate content, and canonicals)
- Crawl depth
- ‘Rule of three clicks’ (theory to make sure that all important pages are discoverable within three clicks of homepage)
- Anchor text
- Mixture of consistent (main keyword) vs varied
- Link placement – think about ‘first click’ rule (Google only notices first anchor text on pages with same internal links)
- 'Read more', 'click here' are poor anchor texts
- Contextual vs template
- Don’t worry about main navigation links when it comes to ‘first click’ rule
- Internal linking should improve the information architecture of the website by creating clearer crawl paths for both Google and users
- Outlinks
- Keep the number of link natural for users, and useful
- Anomalies
- High incoming, low outgoing
- Low incoming, high outgoing
- Passing power
- Also referred to as link equity / page rank
- Relevance is key
- New link opportunities
- Adding internal links from powerful pages (where relevant) is just one tactic
- Gather data from GSC and your uploaded link profile to reveal opportunities (eg, keyword present but not currently linking)
- Remember to consider quantity, quality, and relevance
For more information, visit here.
