Use Internal Links to connect topics in your website

The usage of internal links is one of those SEO strategies that have been found to be very useful.

Internal linking is the process of creating links between one web page and another within the same domain. Like external linking, it is done by hyperlinking texts also albeit to another page on your website rather than a different website. For example, if I already have a post about external linking on my site, I can decide to provide a link on this post for readers who wish to know about it.

Why Is It Important?

It has been established that SEO wise, external links are more effective and understandably so. Who would you rather employ as a web developer assuming they both have the same skill set? Mr. A, who was referred to you by two or more people or Mr. B, who only showed you his previous jobs. Majority of people would employ Mr. A because of his referrals and rightly so.

However, this doesn’t mean internal links have no importance as if they are used correctly; they have the possibility of drawing traffic to different facets of your website thus improving the SEO ranking of your website.

By providing links to various internal pages on your website, what you are doing is encouraging the visitor to visit the other areas and browse other contents asides the one that brought them to the page.

It also helps to connect topics between the pages of your website.

For example, you may have a main topic like “SEO On Page” and different sub-pages within like “Speed optimization”, “Content writing” and so on.

By providing an internal link to every one of these sub-pages, you are sending a message to Google that your website covers many different aspects of the parent topic, in this example “SEO On Page”, giving you more authority and relevance on this particular subject.

After linking two pages, don't forget to submit a sitemap file to Google Search Console if you haven't done yet.

It might also help you convert an ordinary visitor to a regular on your website such that they anticipate your next post. While it is possible for a visitor to turn to regular on your website off a single post, it is more likely to happen if by seeking information, the visitor got access to various more on that same website.

It is also important to make your links appear naturally and logically follow the structure of the sentence.

SILO strategy

The SILO structure is an SEO architecture technique that optimizes the structure of a website, organizing the content in silos of keywords, to increase the relevance of these words in the eyes of search engines.

The objective of this strategy is to increase the relevance of the keywords by structuring the content of the website on different topics, making internal links only between related topics.

If we don't follow a strategy like SILO for websites, and we write a bunch of keywords in one page, without any sense, it will be more difficult for search engines to understand the main topic your page is about.

To give you an example: Let's suppose that in our blog we write about SEO On Page and within this topic, we have different subtopics like:

• Speed optimization
• Use friendly URL's
• Use headings
• etc

It is logical to think that all these thematic areas have elements in common, so we need to structure the content by creating internal links between these pages (as long as they make sense).

Try to avoid linking to other themes that are not directly related to the main topic (SEO On Page in our example).

The SILO technique is one of the most effective tools to give a logical structure to the content you create in your website or blog

Top 5 SEO Tools to help you when linking the pages of your site:

• DeepCrawl (Paid): this plugin has earned its reputation as it can scan virtually every website page of yours while providing you with comprehensive reports which give you a breakdown of the number of H1 tags and noindex pages as well as broken internal and external links.
• Google Search Console (Free): This suite contains a lot of helpful tips that are provided by Google which can help you in duplicate metadata location, determination of the number of indexed pages, tackling security issues, etc.
• Siteliner: SEO Analysis Tool (Paid+Free): this is one of the most outstanding SEO tools that can give you the ability to locate duplicate content on your site, broken links, internal and external links for every page, as well as the size and speed of your page on the average and more
• SEO Internal Links (Paid): A plugin that assists you with internal link structure management on your site. Makes it very easy to carry out internal links tracking seamlessly.
• Nibbler (Paid): with Nibbler, you can perform a wide range of actions such as free site scanning, keywords determination, location of broken links and the age of a domain, internal links location, inbound links, number of listings on directories, word count for every page and popularity.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to help you to manage the internal links in your website

• Interlinks manager (Paid): Interlinks manager is a plugin for WordPress that automatically carries out internal linking and happens to be Gutenberg this plugin is worth it.
• SEO Smart link Premium (Paid): If you're looking to interlink all of your blog articles automatically, this is the right plugin for you as it gets all your taxonomies auto-linked including the tags and categories and you have the liberty of making the rules for auto interlinking.
• SEO Smart Links Plugin (Free): now you can auto-link keywords or key phrases not just in your comments but your posts too with other related posts and pages as well as categories and tags.
• Auto Linker Plugin for WordPress (Free): this is a top-notch solution that helps you to build internal links inside your content. An intuitive configuration of keywords is used for every post.

Did you know? Google’s bots crawl your website following the internal links you have in your site. Having a logical structure of the navigation will help Google to understand what is your website about.

Expert’s suggestion: “Focusing on quality backlinks over quantity is what can help to protect your site as Google updates.” – Adam Riemer (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/natural-link/209256/)