Interlinking is a way of helping your visitors stay on your site longer, improve the rankings of your sub pages, and giving the search engines an easy way to see what you’re pages are relevant for.  Of the many onpage SEO best practices, linking within your own site is often neglected or not done correctly. If you have a CMS for your blog like WordPress installed on your site, you can utilize plugins like SEO smart links to automate the process of interlinking. With or without a tool there are some basic ideas you’ll want to follow when developing your own internal linking.

Get Organized

Have an organized site structure! The easiest way to do this is by using categories and subcategories to put your content under. Lets say your industry is pet grooming and your sub categories are dog grooming, cat grooming, and goat grooming. As you write different pages on How To Groom a German Shepard, Grooming Short Haired Dogs, and Dog Groomers in Springfield, you can link between articles and to the category page itself (Dog Grooming). If you bring up a similar way of trimming around dogs ears, and it’s the same way you would trim a goat, then link across to the Goat Grooming category.

Anchor Text, Huh?

The words on your site that you link from is called the anchor text, and gives both the user and the search engines a clue as to what the page your linking to is about.  Linking words like “Click Here” or “Buy Now” won’t do anything for your rankings. Try a Google search for “click here” and see what kinds of companies pop up. You should rather be linking from the keywords that you want to be showing up on the first page for.  This isn’t something you want to overuse and if you’re just starting, try linking to one page on your site. You’ll want to link to your home page sometimes, a category page, and other articles you’ve written about before.

Natural SEO: Keeping it Simple

If you have some existing content on your site, go through each page and identify another page you can link to with the existing text, or by adding some new to improve your current sites interlinking SEO. Don’t get overly complicated with your interlinking strategy, as with all SEO practices it should be done in a natural and logical way. If you can find some related content on your website and you happened to bring it up in your new article, link to that page. As the saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.