Improve your SEO campaign with internal linking

One thing many novice online marketers (and even some established pros) forget to do is cross-linking their SEO content. Internal links are a vital part of any successful SEO strategy and direct search engine crawlers to pages you see as most relevant for the anchor text that forms the link. For example, if you have a special offers page, and you make reference to special offers in a blog post, then your anchor text “special offers” should be hyperlinked to the special offers page.

Internal linking is another signal to Google and other search engines to reinforce what a page is about. If you have keywords in your title, in your heading tags (h1, h2 etc.) and in the anchor text for internal links, then you are more likely to rank for relevant search phrases inputted by your target market.

This is a fundamental element of any search engine optimisation strategy – but don’t over do it. I usually try to set a limit of one link per 100 words, you can probably get away with more but I think it starts to look unnatural. Also, don’t link to the same internal page twice from a blog post or site article, or even a static page – there is no extra value to be had from linking to a page twice – even if then anchor text is different.

If you can get your internal link in the first 100 words or so, it’s more likely to get crawled by search engines each time they visit the page – there are theories that suggest Googlebots don’t crawl entire pages every single time a crawl is done. They apparently make assumptions that pages haven’t changed and don’t crawl it through to the end – which means links at the end of a document can get overlooked. Not sure if this is an absolute fact of SEO but I have heard it from several industry professionals.