Internal linking is an ongoing process. To make sure it’s successful and improves your SEO, you’ll want to create a clear strategy, detailing what you should do and in what order.
Step 1: Determine Existing Website Structure
To do this, you first want to look at all the pages that exist on your website. You’ll then want to assess the structural hierarchy between these pages.
If your website has a sitemap, it could help if you export the links into a spreadsheet. This will help you to sort and categorise them by type and how they relate to each other.
This should help make the internal linking process much easier.
Step 2: Flag Important Content
Next, you’ll want to flag the pages that are most important to users - the pages you really want them to discover and read. These pages are called ‘pillar pages’.
Step 3: Make Use of Pillar Pages and Add Contextual Links
Pillar pages will help you build ‘topic clusters’. These are collections of pages that relate to the topic of the pillar page. Topic clusters around a pillar page allow you to link to and between pages.
For example, if you have a ‘craft beer’ page, you can create pages such as ‘how to brew craft beer’ or ‘craft IPA events’ pages. The ‘craft beer’ pillar page would link to all of these pages and create a sub-network of links. This will allow the user to navigate easily between pages.
Step 4: Identify High-Authority Pages
High-authority pages tend to be the pages with the most backlinks. Internal linking helps to spread authority between pages. Therefore you can use internal linking to support your new pages or pages that need more authority. This can help improve these pages' current rankings.
Step 5: Link Hierarchical Pages
This allows users to navigate easily between different levels of pages. You can use breadcrumb links to do this, which link up to the parent pages.
It’s important here to link from parent pages to child pages, and also cross-link between relevant pages on the same hierarchical levels.
Step 6: Add a related, new and popular posts section to your website
If you have a blog page, then adding a section at the end of each article with related, new or popular posts will allow you to create relevant internal links throughout your blog.
This will also help your new posts gain authority and link equity.
Step 7: Add navigational links
Ensure you add your key pages to the most appropriate navigational section of your website. This could be the main menu, sidebar menu or category menus.
This will help users and Google to navigate through your website without getting lost!