5 Opportunities to Increase Internal Links to Improve SEO

When optimizing your website, internal linking is the often most overlooked and undervalued tactic. The “SEO value” of your site is often condensed

on a few pages when it can (and should!) be “shared” throughout your website with internal links. When done right, it not only improves your search rankings but the website usability for your visitors.

Internal linking also promotes the flow of link juice throughout a site, allows you to strategically channel link juice to targeted pages, improves usability and overall crawlability of your site, can decrease your bounce rate, increase page views per visitor, etc. I could go on. You also have complete control in creating the optimal anchor text and secure priority placement in the body text for internal links.

When you do a technical SEO audit of your site, one of the first things that will make an impact is creating and implementing an internal linking strategy. I’ve listed out the best ways to create opportunities for internal links to improve your website’s SEO.

5 Opportunities to Boost Your Internal Linking Strategy

Blog posts & new pages
Your website’s content, especially blog posts and new pages, are filled with opportunities to pass link juice to other pages of your site. To start improving your internal linking strategy, create a list of your website content and identify where it makes sense to insert in context links that can link to other pages on your website. Be sure to use the keywords/phrases in the anchor text that you would like the destination pages to rank for. Links within posts also helps navigate your reader to other relevant pages to your website.

“Keyword niche” glossary
A glossary can be a great resource for your website visitors. It’s also a limitless opportunity to create specific pages for niche content and rank for long tail keywords. These glossary pages should also link to new pages that need more link juice and be linked to by other content on your site, thus serving as a SEO landing page.

Visible site map
Submitting your XML site map to search engines signals to the search engine bots what pages are available to crawl on your site. It doesn’t do anything for passing SEO authority throughout your site. This is why you also need to include a visible site map. It’s an index of your website content which makes it easier for users to jump to specific sections of your website and it also passes link juice across the most important pages of your website.

SEO landing pages/Pillar Page
A pillar page is a single page that serves as an information source for one keyword phrase. All other pages that have content related to the pillar page should have a link that is pointed to the pillar page. The pillar page should also link to other pages, content rich, and be deeply integrated within your website to show up organically in search for that focused keyword phrase.

Fat footer
Make good SEO use of that space at the bottom of your website by adding a fat footer. Suggesting other content at the end of a page makes your site more user-friendly and highlights to a visitor your most important pages. From the footer, a website visitor can access a specific section or functionality of your site in a quick way regardless of the hierarchy and you can internally link all your pages (since the footer lays across your entire site).