The Dos And Don’ts Of Internal Linking

Internal linking is very important from the SEO perspective. It’s a lot more than just providing a good UI and attracting people towards the linked text. It plays a vital role in on-page SEO as it creates a hierarchy of information and spreads the link juice of powerful content towards other content that’s less effective. It creates a topic cluster that redirects your audience from the key piece of content to other related pieces, and from there to the main content.

Internal linking is as important as creating your external links on other websites for directing more traffic to your site. Following are some dos and don’ts of internal linking.

1) Do create content for better internal linking

Before creating content, always plan about how your content should be written for better internal linking. Create it in a manner that you can add multiple internal links that relate to your content. It helps your readers to easily find more content that they want and also improves your website’s structure. By doing this, you can help your site to rank higher in the SERPs with a faster speed.

2) Do link old posts to the new posts

Linking your old posts to the new posts can improve your site’s structure and upgrade the overall existence of the website. Usually, people visit the most recent content and neglect the old posts. To solve this issue, it’s important to link the old content to the new one. This also helps new content to rank up if the previous one is good.

3) Don’t leave orphan pages

Never leave orphan pages. The pages that aren’t linked in any of your posts become orphaned. It’s difficult for Google to find such pages that aren’t pointed out by any other page. As we’ve mentioned before, linking old pages to new pages is good practice, so you can check out your whole site for these types of orphan pages and link them in the new ones.

4) Don’t add an internal link on the focus key-phrase

Never add any link to your focus key-phrase, either external or internal. Doing this shows that you want the search engines to focus on the content that’s on the linked page rather than to focus on the content that’s on the same page. It doesn’t put a good impact on your on-page SEO and diverts the attention of the crawler to the linked page’s content. This can become an obstruction for that page to improve search visibility.

5) Don’t add too many links

Never link too much because by doing this, search engine crawlers’ attention is diverted towards multiple pages which decreases that page’s link value. So always try to use the necessary links to your content.

6) Do link in the last paragraph

Always try to add internal links in the ending paragraphs. This prevents your audience from diverting towards another page without reading the entire piece of content. Also, from the SEO point of view, linking in the starting paragraphs isn’t good as this diverts the attention of search engine crawlers which creates difficulty in ranking in the SERPs.

These are some of the most important dos and don’ts of internal linking. Hope you liked the article and would appreciate it. If you want anything to be added to this article, please suggest it in the comments section.