Internal Linking Best Practices

It’s common knowledge in the SEO world that external link building is one of the most effective levers we can pull.

But you know what people always forget about?

Internal links.

Improving internal-link anchor text, structure, and frequency is one of the first things I explore when working with a new client.

If they haven’t focused on this before, just a couple of hours of optimization can produce some quick wins.

Many SEOs think they are doing internal linking right—I mean, they add in a couple of internal links whenever they publish an article—but it’s far from optimal.

This guide will comprise two newsletters: The first will primarily discuss what pages you want to build internal links to as well as how to find internal link opportunities throughout your site. 

And the second part is all about adding internal links within your page(s), whether that’s in the content, a sidebar, or elsewhere. Along with what anchor text to use.

Where to send internal links

If you’ve been link building for any decent amount of time, you know it’s not always feasible to build links to your money pages.

For e-commerce, this would be category and product pages.

For SaaS, this would be solution and landing pages. 

For blogs, this would be all your “review” and “best of” content.

Since other websites don’t want to link to our money pages, we content marketers create informational guides that are highly shareable and noncommercial.

It’s why the classic Skyscraper Technique still works wonders to this day.

Getting backlinks to info pages is great. They 100% help with overall domain authority and brand recognition. 

But backlinks to these informational pages don’t result in a direct revenue increase. 

And dollar bills pay the bills, not traffic. 

What you want do:

1. Create amazing informational content people will link to

2. Perform cold email outreach to get backlinks

3. Once you’re done pitching an article, add internal links to your money pages

Example

If we take a look at the “Best by links” report in Ahrefs, we find that Semrush’s article on content marketing statistics has over 2,271 referring domains.

That’s a shit ton of link juice pointing to this page!

And while it’s cool that this page brings in thousands of unique visitors each month, I doubt it brings in any revenue.

So, what should Semrush do?

Edit this page to add a ton of internal links to their “AI Content Marketing Statistics” article. 

If we click into the AI content marketing report, guess what we find? 

A landing page designed to capture email addresses.

This is a clear-cut case of Semrush trying to push as much internal link juice as possible to a landing page that, if it ranks, can generate leads and/or revenue.

Go ahead, download that PDF and let me know how many emails you get. 😉

Add internal links from your strongest pages

Assuming you’ve never done an internal link audit before, let me bless you by teaching you. 

First off, you need to know your money pages. What pages would you LOVE to rank number one? 

What pages bring in revenue, leads, and the like?

Next, figure out what pages on your (or your client’s) site have the most link juice, i.e., the most backlinks.

To do this, run your website through Ahrefs’ “Best by links” report.

This makes it incredibly easy to find the strongest pages. 

From here, open up your strongest pages and start adding internal links. 

It’s seriously that simple ya’ll . . . 

A couple of pro tips: 

Homepage: 99.99% of the time, your homepage will have the most backlinks. So, make sure to always have internal links on your homepage that point to your most valuable money pages.

Menu nav: Links within the menu nav are technically on every page of your website—since your menu nav is on every page of your website. While I don’t think menu nav links add a ton of link juice, they 100% improve crawl frequency to articles within them. 

So, make sure to put your most important pages within your menu nav. It’s why Nerd Wallet and similar sites have “mega menus.” 

Footer: The same is true for the footer as with the menu nav. Increases crawlability but won’t necessarily pass a ton of link juice.

You should 100% throw your more important pages in the footer.

New article, where art thou?

When you publish a new piece of content, it can take a while to get crawled and indexed, and eventually rank. 

To speed up this process, you want to add internal links to new articles as soon as they are published.

I recommend doing this in two places.

1. Home page

As I mentioned above, your homepage is typically the strongest page on your website. Because of this, it’s crawled the most frequently.

Therefore, if you add internal links within the homepage, Google bot will quickly pick them up.

You don’t need to do anything crazy here. Just have a “latest articles” or “latest news” section that automatically pulls in new pages/posts you’ve created.

However, I know some of you don’t want to put links to articles on your homepage, and it honestly won’t make sense for some business models, so that’s why we have step number two.

2. Already indexed pages

Let’s say I’m Gym Shark and just published my article on the six best arm exercises.

When I publish this, I will do a “site:” search to find other articles on my site that are relevant to arm exercises.

From here, I would naturally add in two to three internal links to my NEW article from these pages that are already indexed. 

The articles on the best bicep, tricep, and resistance band arm exercises are all great candidates that naturally make sense.