Internal linking is an important SEO tactic, that will also help you optimise your pages for your users.
From an SEO perspective, adding internal links is crucial if you want your site to achieve a high organic search ranking. It plays an important role in helping Google crawl your site, which will make it easy for people to find and use your site.
Adding descriptive anchor text will help you rank highly for certain keywords. Anchor text is the clickable text in your hyperlink and should always be relevant to what you’re linking to.
The key to writing good anchor text is to understand your users and what they are interested in. It is important to give enough contextual information for them to understand where a link will take them. If there is less context, the anchor should be more descriptive.
Internal linking is also a useful tool in directing traffic to older parts of your site, such as blog posts, that perhaps aren’t getting much traffic anymore. By linking to other pages, you are re-directing traffic to other areas of your site, strengthening your organic ranking and providing users with valuable content. This could also improve your bounce rate as you are giving your users another reason to stay on the site and read some more.
The example below shows the anchor text linking to a previous blog post where the user can do some further reading if they would like to. This is a good example of re-directing traffic to other areas of your site while also providing relevant and interesting content.
Internal linking can also improve the user experience. By using descriptive anchor text, you can allow your users to discover more content on a related topic and do some further reading. It allows you to reinforce the point you’re making by providing more details or statistics.
Above is an example of successful internal linking. The anchor text (highlighted in blue) provides enough information to tell the user where the link will take them. It reinforces the point the publisher is making and signals to the reader that if they would like to do some further reading, this is where they can find it.
While internal linking can be beneficial for SEO purposes and to improve the user experience, adding too many links will decrease their value and click through rate. By ensuring that all links add value, you can maximise the impact of internal links.
For more information about internal linking, get in touch with your partner manager.