Best Practices for Internal Linking

It's now time to get down to the details. How do you go about internal linking? How can you create the most value from links?

Two things are essential:

• Write new content regularly for the site. This is essential for effective internal linking.
• Link to and from content-heavy pages

These links connect articles to each other and are the best internal links. This creates strong internal links deep within the site.

You will have sufficient links to your site's main pages if you have good site architecture. These pages don't require more links.

If you want to increase conversions by using a sales page or squeeze page, and the opportunity is right for you, link to it.

I prefer linking in and between long-form articles for the most part. This will naturally spread your internal linking. Anchor Text is used to create text links

Which Type of Internal Links Works Best?

It's easy: Use descriptive anchor text for links. What does descriptive anchor text mean?

Anchor text is something you are familiar with. Anchor text refers to the word or combination of words that link to another page. These texts are usually displayed as blue text to the user. This is anchor text.

Anchor text should be used for internal links. But not any anchor text will do. Use phrases to describe the purpose of the target link.

These are the three things you should not do when it comes to your internal linking:

• Don't try to match the anchor text with the link target exactly. The Penguin update has linked this technique to SEO penalties. Because exact match anchor text isn't often found in regular content, search engines today are more sensitive to it. It looks unnatural, but it is.
• Avoid using phrases such as "click here." These are not worth the effort. The anchor text must be in some way related to the linked webpage.
• Link only one sentence at a time! A hyperlinked paragraph can be ugly and make for a poor user experience. Use anchor text to point at an internal link.

A page should have a minimum number of links.

You should add five to ten links to older articles when you create a new piece. This is important for your internal linking strategy as well as how search engines rank and review your content.

Why?

Google uses a website's "freshness value" to determine if it is rank-worthy. Cyrus Shepard says that links from new sites or pages have fresh value.

It can increase the likelihood that a page will rank higher in the SERPs by pinging it with a link. Search engines see that readers who click on your internal links "refresh" older content by showing that it is still relevant.

Be careful to not over-expand your content with hyperlinks. Moz states that search engine crawlers can only access 150 links per page. They stop spidering after that. Your SEO could be negatively affected if you overstuff your pages with links.

Linking is important, but not too much. This will benefit both your user experience and search crawlers.