Optimize Your Internal Linking Strategy for 2023

SEO is not only about building/earning high-quality, relevant links. It’s also about devising and implementing a solid internal linking strategy, among many other things.

You see, internal linking not just boosts your SEO efforts – it makes it easier for Google to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

What are Internal Links?

Internal linking is the process of linking to other pages on your own website from within your content. It can be a useful SEO technique because it helps search engines understand the structure of your website and the relationships between different pages. It can also help users navigate your website more easily and find additional content that they may be interested in.

Links that target the same domain on which they exist (in order to give users more value and more insight, and to stick them to your website) are known as internal links.

Site navigation is the best example of internal linking. Navigation links not just help users easily browse through your site – they tell search engines what are your most important pages, spreading link juice within your site.

Best Internal Linking Strategy

Use descriptive anchor text:

The text that you use to link to another page should accurately describe the content of that page. This helps users and search engines understand the context of the link.

Link to relevant pages:

Make sure that the pages you are linking to are relevant to the content of the page where the link is placed.

Use a hierarchy:

Use internal linking to create a hierarchy on your website, with the most important pages linked to directly from the home page and less important pages linked to from within those pages.

Use a mix of follow and nofollow links:

Follow links pass link equity to the linked page, while nofollow links do not. It’s a good idea to use a mix of both types of links in order to create a natural link profile.

Monitor link equity:

Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor the link equity of your pages and ensure that it is being distributed in a way that is beneficial to your website.

Internal Linking Best Practices 

Best internal linking practices for 2023 for drawing visitors to high-converting pages for further generating more revenue for your business.

• Footer links are not bad unless they target useful pages of your website.
• Never (ever!) nofollow your internal links.
• Internal linking doesn’t mean you can over-optimize your anchor texts. Create descriptive anchors and make sure they look terribly natural, as you do with external links. Okay, you may use keywords occasionally but don’t get obsessed over it.
• We recommend breadcrumb navigation as it’s a great way to do internal linking, one that also tells users where exactly they are on your site, hence increasing their experience.
• Use tools like Broken Link Checker to make sure there’s no broken link on your site.
• In an ecommerce site, one great way to do internal linking is by providing the “people who viewed this also viewed” section.
• Make sure to limit internal links to maximum 100 per page.

In enterprise-level sites – ones that have tens of thousands of pages – linking low authority pages to the high-authority, linked-to pages helps solve indexation problems.

Did we miss anything? Do let us know in the comments below. 🙂