When you build the site architecture of your website you have to consider two things
- Keep your website users are happy by providing the information they are looking for, and allow them to find things quickly and easily
- Create a good foundation for a search engine to crawl and index your pages so that it can show the pages of your website for the search query of the user
Internal linking plays an important role when you try to achieve above two goals
What is internal link building?
An internal link is a link from one of your pages to another page of the same domain. These internal links act as the bridges between pages.
Users and Search engines can easily navigate your website using these links.
Why are internal links important?
Most webmasters neglect the importance of internal link building.
But building Internal links are very important since a website with a good internal link structure can serve users as well as the search engine.
Search engine can understand the site architecture
Search engines can read your sitemap and index your pages without any issue but there should be a way to understand your site architecture and content clusters. If you can build a proper interlinking structure then Googlebot can navigate through these pages and understand the relationship between pages.
End result is; Search engine can understand what you are talking about on your site and it will evaluate the authority level of your website.
Users can find what they need quickly and easily
Within 2 -3 clicks people should be able to reach any page.
Consistency of your linking structure enables users to navigate the site with confidence and easily
- Use same color and fonts for contextual links (navigation style)
- Use header and footer links only for important pages (main topics)
- Connect related pages properly so that user can go through them
- Use a proper name for anchor text ( see below for more details)
Pass authority between pages
Google’s PageRank algorithm assesses the authority of individual pages, so interlinking makes it easy to understand the relationship between pages.
- Page A has the external link from authoritative site
- Page A has internal link to page B on the same domain
- This authority can passed to Page B
What are the basics you should know?
Anchor text
An anchor text is a word or set of words that are linked to another page and they typically appear as blue text to the reader. So content around the anchor text sends a signal to the Search Engine, the relevancy of the linked page
In pure HTML code, you can see the anchor text like this
<a href="" > Anchor Text </a>This is how you see anchor text in your browser window. highlighted with blue color
Internal link building tools
Best Practices
Use keyword-rich anchor text whenever possible and make sure your anchor text is natural to web copy
Do not over-optimize the anchor text (Do not do keyword stuffing)
Do not use exact same keyword to every link’s anchor text
Create one unique URL per unique piece of content. Do not mess up your site content by creating several URLs to the same piece of content
Do not use the same anchor text for different pages because Google will confuse with it
You can put the internal link closer to the top of your page so that you can reduce your bounce rate and improve Dwell Time.
Link to important pages and pillar posts
Use Dofollow in link to pass the authority to the next page
You can create an internal link from the homepage to an important page (or Pillar Pages) to pass the authority
Study how interlinks are used your competitors
Build Internal Links with WordPress
It is very easy to build internal links with WordPress Block Editor. But you have to maintain separate documents to keep track of the internal links you are building.
When you build content silos you have to do it in a systematical way
Conclusion
Do not make the internal link-building process complicated. You can just follow the best practices to build your links gradually.
If you are going to build a new website you can plan the site architecture and content silos early.
If you already have a website you can build internal links gradually and you see how the ranking goes up over the time
I hope this article helped you learn how to add internal links and organize them in WordPress. You may also want to see our WordPress SEO 101 Guide to boost your rankings