Internal linking best practices part two

Note: This week is a continuation of last week's article about internal linking. 

If you missed it, please give it a read before continuing because it’ll paint a bigger picture. This week is all about internal link placement and anchor text selection.

Back in 2023, I went to Chiang Mai SEO and listened to one of the most intriguing speakers I’ve heard to date, Kristoffer Holten. 

Kristoffer is a kingpin in the casino niche and his link building budget is more than Hunter S. Thompson’s cocaine budget.

Let’s just say it’s high, like Hunter was most of the time. 

In-content internal link placement

After building thousands and thousands of links, Kristoffer told us that the first link on a page passes the most link juice.

I heard this. Tested it. And sure as shit, it works. And now that you’ve heard it too, the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon will take full effect and you’ll notice everywhere how some of the best SEOs in the world use it.

To apply this concept yourself, whenever adding an internal link from an info page to a money page, try to make it the first link in your content, not including the menu nav.

Continuing last week's example, you’ll remember Semrush has an article about content marketing statistics that has 2,271 backlinks.

This article barely converts its visitors to leads, so Semrush internally links (first link on the page) to a landing page, AI content marketing report, which is set up to capture leads. 

This not only pushes link juice to Semrush’s AI content marketing landing page but also pushes visitors who land on the content marketing report to the landing page, where they will hopefully hand over their email address.

A creative way to add these internal links is to turn them into buttons, as we can see Nerd Wallet doing on its best credit cards article. 

Lots of benefits in doing this: 

• Passes link juice to subpages: Best travel credit card, best low-interest credit card, and so on.
  

• Increases engagement: Some users land on the best credit card page but are mainly interested in a credit card for high travel rewards. Clicking a button dedicated to credit cards for travel points them directly where they need to go.
  

• Increases click-through rate (CTR): Indeed, 9.7 times out of 10, whenever I replace clickable words with a button, it increases the CTR. This is tremendously helpful when trying to push people to a money/conversion page.

Sidebar internal links

We know that in-content links are the best at passing link juice, but don’t sleep on the sidebar. If you get creative with it, you can create a solid web of internal links that will build topical authority.

In addition, users love it because it makes navigating your website that much easier and it points them to the next article in their search journey.

The Match Artist is implementing this strategy far better than most.

If I’m trying to get more matches on Tinder, I might just land on this article. Let’s assume I take The Match Artist’s advice and get some high-quality photos taken of me.

You know the type of photos: walking on a beach, drinking a martini in a suit, feeding a starving dog—all the good stuff.

My profile on Tinder is now the number one cause of carpal tunnel because so many are swiping right.

But guess what? I suck at opening. I don’t know what to say and I freak people out because my first message is all about the earth being flat and how we never actually landed on the moon.

Lucky for me, The Match Artist is here to set me straight with an article on the best first text to send on Tinder.

This is a prime example of helping a user and pushing them along their search journey. At first I just wanted more matches.

Then I needed to get better at my messaging. 

And finally, I needed help preparing for the date I just scored.

Again, this is well designed and this sidebar helps from not just an SEO perspective but also a user-experience perspective.

Anchor text to use for internal links

Going back to the Semrush example, the one area it could improve is its anchor text selection.

When talking about anchor text, we’re talking about the words that make up the clickable part of a link.

When Google scans articles and crawls links, it also reviews the anchor text that a page uses when pointing to other URLs.

If I link to my personal website, AlexHorsman.com, and use the anchor text “Mark Wahlberg,” I’m signaling to Google that my website is about Marky Mark. That’s not right. My rhymes will not groove you.

But if I link to my personal website like this, Alex Horsman, then I’m signaling to search engines that my personal site is related to Alex Horsman and this page should rank when people search my name. This is right.

General best practice is to give your internal links anchor text relatively close to the main keyword your article targets (details below).

If I’m Semrush and I’m internally linking TO my AI content marketing statistics article FROM my content marketing report, then I want to use relevant anchor text:

• AI content marketing

• AI marketing statistics

• AI content marketing statistics

Right now the anchor text says only “Semrush.”

While this isn’t bad per se, it could be optimized by adjusting the anchor text. 

Now, notice how I italicized relatively above. This isn’t an accident. 

Cyrus Shepard has one of the most killer internal link analyses, in which he reviews over 23 million internal links across the web. This report proves that a variety of anchor text pointing to one page equals better rankings. 

This data tells us that we don’t want to just use the same anchor text over and over. We want to switch it up.

If Semrush is trying to rank its AI content marketing statistics article for the keyword “AI marketing statistics” then it should vary its anchor text throughout the site. 

To find optimal anchor text, put your main keyword into Ahrefs’ keyword explorer and look at the “Matching terms” report. 

All the above options are solid candidates.