Originally published on August 17th, 2017. Updated for December 1st, 2020.
Does your business have a blog or lots of content on your website? That’s great! Keep up the good work.
Wherever you’re at in terms of creating content for your website, it’s important to keep that content organized and connected in meaningful ways. Internal linking is an important aspect of that organization. Here is the what, why, and how.
What is internal linking?
An internal link is a link that leads to a different page on the same website. So in our case, an internal link leads to another page at technologyaloha.com. This is as opposed to an external link, which connects to a page on a different, external website.
Internal links might be used to connect readers to related content, show them where they can find more information on a topic, or provide a next step or course of action. For example, if this post had anything to do with dogs, I could suggest you go check out Bailey the Office Pup’s profile (← internal link).
Why is internal linking important?
Internal linking is helpful for the navigation and organization of your website, as well as for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
It helps your readers find the information they’re looking for and organizes your content to provide logical links to other relevant pages and posts. Do you ever come across a really terrible website where it takes you 10 minutes just to find the info you were looking for? Yeah, let’s not do that. Give your readers plenty of clear, useful links so they can get where they want to go as quickly and easily as possible.
Internal linking is helpful to SEO for many of the same reasons. Just replace “you” with “Google” in the above scenario. The idea is to make your site layout as clear and organized to Search Engines as possible. This helps them accurately ‘read’ and organize the content on your site.
How to include internal links
Take a look at your page or blog post, and identify what links would be useful to your ideal readers and clients.
Did you include a next step or call to action at the end of your post? Include a link that makes it super easy and obvious for your reader to take action. Is there a topic you mentioned that they might want more information on? Provide a helpful tangent. (For example, maybe now you’re inspired to add a business blog to your website. Here’s how to write a great blog post.)
When you create your internal links, try to use descriptive anchor text as much as possible. Anchor text is the portion of clickable text that’s underlined (or in our case, blue and bolded). Readers and search engines like to know where they’re headed before clicking on an unknown link, so try to use informative text instead of just “click here.”
Ready to go add some helpful internal links to the content on your website and blog? Your readers and clients will be happy to be able to easily find more great info on your site.
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Into the Inbound with Technology Aloha
