Creating Internal Links

Internal links has a vital role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Let’s assume you have a page about ‘pencil sharpeners’ – and you want this page to rank well for the keyword ‘pencil sharpeners’. To get the desired ranking for this page, you will have to optimize the page well, get some external links and also get some internal links.

Internal Links is the links that you have for a page on your blog (website) from other pages on your website.

Internal links tells Google that you consider your page to have good content and hence are linking it from other pages of your website. If there are no internal links at all for a page, then Google will assume that you don’t consider your page to be important enough to be linked from other pages.

Here is an example to better illustrate this point (an example unrelated to web pages and Google) – If employees of a company speak highly about the work culture of their company then others will think highly of it.

But if the employees speak badly of the culture then others will assume that it is not a good place to work – Now going back to websites, having a lot internal links to your page is the same as the employees speaking highly of their company.

Apart from SEO reasons, internal links also plays a very important role in your interaction with your readers. When I am writing about erasers, by providing a link to ‘pencil sharpeners’, I am giving my readers a link to more related information (which they can choose to read by clicking the link if they want to find out more about ‘pencil sharpeners’ ).

Here are a couple of key points to keep in mind when creating your internal links:

• Use anchor text – When you are linking to your page about ‘pencil sharpeners’ make sure you use ‘pencil sharpeners’ as your anchor text and not something unrelated like ‘click here’.
• Always use the full url to create the link – example ‘http://www.imbizjourney.com/search-engine-ranking-by-keyword/’ and not ‘/search-engine-ranking-by-keyword/’.

A lot of bloggers find it too much work to provide internal links. And here is how I get around the ‘work’ problem…
When I am blogging, I always have my blog in one tab and my wordpress admin page on another tab. This way, as I am writing a post, if I want to link to my page about ‘erasers’, I can quickly move to the tab with my blog and use the search facility there and search for ‘erasers’. This brings up all my posts with erasers in it. I copy the url of the most relevant page and create a link to that page in the post I am writing.

Having both blog and admin pages side by side makes it all super simple and super quick.

A lot of blogs have a related posts at the end of each post – there is a plugin in wordpress to do this. But I find it too distracting – it occupies too much space, distracts my reader from the call to action and plus the links created this way don’t have the right anchor text. Rather than the plugin, I prefer to be generous with creating internal links.

Are you generous with your internal links? Do you have any tips to share on this topic? Leave a comment below…

Best,