Phoenix SEO: How to make the most of your internal links

Internal linking is an incredibly straightforward concept. But it is also an incredibly important one. Every website owner should be internally linking and indeed many are without even realizing it. That’s because it is a powerful SEO technique and considerably improves your website’s user experience, too. If you want to learn how you can improve your internal linking or how you can get started with internal linking, read the following steps for success.

Start by creating loads of content

You can start building internal links if you don’t have lots of pages to build them from and to build links to. Lots and lots of high-quality content is essential if you want to succeed with internal linking. A few good pages aren’t enough. Users don’t want to be redirected back to the same handful of pages every time they click on your links, they want to discover something new and interesting. So before you get carried away with building links, start by building out your content first.

Use anchor text where possible but don’t over-optimize it

When building internal links, you’re going to want to focus on building links within the text of your page, rather than using images as links. That’s because Google prefers links from text and adds more weight to them. Don’t try to force keywords into your content in order to include them in the internal link, however. Your anchor text should be natural and descriptive while including a keyword or part of a keyword phrase where possible. Most importantly, your anchor texts should be descriptive so that users know what they are going to read.

Focus on deep pages

When building internal links, you don’t want to focus on the very top level pages like your home page and your contact page. Instead, you’re going to want to focus on building links to much deeper pages like product pages and blog posts — the kind of pages that people may not find naturally. These pages are going to benefit most from internal linking, both in terms of the SEO boost and the additional traffic,

Make sure you use follow links

There are two types of links follow links and nofollow links. Nofollow links are ignored by Google and don’t boost SEO. They were introduced as a way for sites to tell Google not to give value to the linking page and to not pass any link juice. This is the opposite of our goal with internal linking, which is why it is essential to make sure all internal links are follow links.

Link but don’t go crazy

It is important to build internal links, but you shouldn’t go overboard with the tactic. No one wants to read a page with dozens of internal links throughout. It makes the page hard to read and it takes away value from the internal links that matter. If you find yourself linking more than a handful of times in the same article, you should probably stop unless the piece is exceptionally long.