Internal Links in WordPress – Best Practices for SEO

What are Internal Links?

There are two kinds of links on web pages: internal links and external links.

Internal links are of two kinds:

• Navigational links
• Contextual links

Navigational links are mainly found in menus. The text in a navigational link is often one word, such as ‘Contact’, ‘Home’, ‘About’, or ‘Blog’.

But you also find navigational links in a Table of Contents.

For example, this article has a table of contents with navigational links.

Contextual links are links that are surrounded by text. They are links located within the body of an article.

Contextual links tell the search engine what the context is for that link.

Google gives more weight to contextual links than navigational links. Why? Because contextual links say more about the meaning of the linked text.

So, what’s the deal with internal links? Why are they so important?

Why are Internal Links Important?

Internal links are important for your visitors and they are also important for the search engines.

Your visitors

Internal links help your visitors navigate around your website.

Let’s say you have an article about backpacking in Europe. And let’s say you have another article about how to choose the right backpack.

In the first article, you could link the word ‘backpacking’ to the second article. That would be very helpful to your reader, as they probably need to buy a backpack.

When you create relevant internal links like this, your reader spends more time on your site.

And that leads us to the second reason internal links are important…

The search engines

Time on page / time on site

Google measures how long a visitor spends on your website after clicking through from the search results.

The longer your visitor spends on your site, the more likely it is that your content answered their search query.

The result?

Google is going to move you up the search results.

In a nutshell, internal links keep your visitors on your website for longer. And that improves your search engine optimization (SEO).

Help search engines index your content

But internal links also help the search engines find and index your content.

Search engines can only find web pages that are linked to from another web page.

So, the more internal links you create, the easier it is for the search engines to find and index your content.

Create better website  architecture

Here’s another reason internal links are important:

Internal links create your website architecture. And website architecture is a key factor in SEO.

The most SEO-friendly site architecture is a three-tier structure:

• Tier 1 is your home page
• Tier 2 are your category pages
• Tier 3 are your articles or blog posts

At this point, you have to decide whether you want the internal link to pass link equity (‘link juice’) or not.

If the link is to a purely admin page like a contact form, then you probably wouldn’t want to pass on link juice.

In that case, make the link ‘nofollow’.

In the classic WordPress editor, you have to do this manually. Just add the rel="nofollow" code to the ahref snippet:

But if you use a third-party page editor, it will almost certainly do this for you.

This is what it looks like in Thrive Architect:

 Internal Links and Anchor Text

Anchor text is the word, or words, contained within the link. In this example, the anchor text is ‘time on page’:

Internal Linking Strategies

There are various internal linking strategies that will pass page authority from pages that have a lot of it to pages that don’t.

Internal linking strategy #1

On most websites, the home page or index page usually has more page authority than any other page.

So it’s a good practice to have links from your home page brand new blog posts.

This happens by default in most WordPress themes, so you don’t need to do anything.

Internal linking strategy #2

Linking between related pages creates topic clusters. These topic clusters help Google understand topical authority on your website. And that should give you an SEO advantage.

One way to do this is to create a ‘Related Articles’ box at the end of each blog post.

The related articles links become a topic cluster. For more information on how to do this, see my article How to Create Content Clusters and Rank Higher in the Search Results.

Internal linking strategy #3

Another internal linking strategy is to link from each article to a category page. Half-way down your article, you can insert a Call To Action box with a link to the relevant category page.

Here’s one final internal linking strategy that many bloggers overlook.

Internal linking strategy #4

When you publish a new blog post, most people focus on linking from the new article to existing articles. And that’s certainly good practice.

But the new blog post has no page authority whatsoever. It needs links pointing to it more than any other article on your website.

So here’s the linking strategy: find three or four of your existing pages that deal with the same broad topic. And then link from them to the new page

To do this, go to Google and type in inurl:yourwebsite followed by the main keyword for your new article.

Let’s say you’ve written an article on the subject of ‘bounce rate’.

Type in this search expression:

Then create internal links from those three articles to the new blog post.

Internal Linking Plugins

There are several internal linking plugins that automatically insert links between pages on your site.

Here are some of the functions that internal linking plugins can do for you:

• count the number of internal links plus number of visits generated by each internal link
• calculate the flow of link juice for each internal link
• make suggestions for links in new articles
• automatically convert specific keywords or phrases into internal links
• track all clicks made by your visitors on internal links
• automatically link taxonomies (tags and categories)
• set internal linking rules that are triggered by particular keywords or phrases
• set which keywords link to which URLs - every time one of these keywords occurs in an article, the plugin automatically adds the relevant link
• set how many internal links are created per phrase
  add new internal links to older posts
• automatically update internal links, so that when the URL of the linked page changes, so also does the link in the linking pages

This seems like a very useful set of functions to add to your internal linking.

My advice, however, is not to use an internal linking plugin.

Why?

Two reasons:

Firstly, internal linking is too sensitive to be left to a plugin.

Linking should be natural. But when you leave it to an algorithm, it’s likely to become unnatural.

Once you allow a plugin to do your internal linking, you’ve lost control over a sensitive aspect of SEO.

You might have to undo hundreds, even thousands, of internal links that are damaging your SEO. That’s a scenario I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Secondly, internal linking plugins place a heavy burden on your server response time.

How to Do an Internal Link Audit

This sounds great for new blog posts. But what about all the pages you've published that don’t have internal links?”

That’s why you need to do an internal link audit.

SEMrush ($99 p/month) has a site audit tool that will find pages without internal links. So does Ahrefs (also $99 p/month though they also have 7-day trial for $7).

But there’s another way to do an audit of your internal links. And it’s completely free.

Download and install the free Yoast SEO plugin (if you don’t already have it).

Then click on ‘All Posts’ in the main dashboard menu and look for the 2 Internal Link columns:

If the second Internal Link column is not showing, click on ‘Screen Options’ in the top right corner:

In the drop-down menu, check the box next to ‘Outgoing internal links’:

All you need to do now is scroll down through your list of blog posts, looking at the number of internal links in each post:

The left column shows the number of outgoing internal links. The right column shows the number of incoming internal links.

There’s no ideal number of internal links that a blog post should have (either incoming or outgoing).

Matt Cutts (formerly of Google) advised keeping internal links to a reasonable number. But he didn’t specify what a ‘reasonable number' is (except that it should be less than 100).

I aim to have about 5 to 10 outgoing links in each post.

Do’s and Don’ts of Internal Linking

Here are some do’s and don’ts for creating internal links:

• Do create 5 to 10 internal links in each new blog post
• Don’t over optimize anchor text (using the same word as anchor text)
• Don’t use generic instructions (e.g. “click here”) as anchor text
• Do be natural in your linking
• Do use linking strategies (see above)
• Do conduct an internal linking audit of previous posts
• Do make internal links ‘dofollow’ (except when linking to admin pages)
• Do use internal links to help your reader get more information on key topics

Conclusion

Internal links help your readers and the search engines to access and understand your content.

Internal links also allow you to distribute link juice from pages that have no page authority to pages that do.

When used strategically, internal links can keep your readers on your site for longer. And that, in turn, can boost your rankings in the search engines.

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