The ultimate internal linking guide for SMEs and SEOs
“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.
2021-09-29
