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Internal link building is the most powerful SEO tactic you are not using.
It’s a tactic used by most well-known websites…
(i.e. those already ranking in the top 10) for one simple reason:
It has the power to boost your search traffic like crazy.Don’t believe me?
I’ll show you how one website used internal linking to increase search traffic by 40% and another website that went from position #33 to #5.
It’s also extremely easy to implement and carries (almost) zero risk of penalties.
Sound good?
I’ll be showing you everything you need to know about internal link building (and more).
What Will I Learn?
There are two types of links:
Internal and external.
Internal links will take you to a web page or resource on the same domain.
Whereas external links will take you to a resource on a different domain.
Download our link building checklist here.
Internal links give you control over the flow of human traffic and search engine traffic which can be used in different ways.
Not only that but Google used to state–
And more recently than that…
…Google’s John Mueller went on record to say-
“The context we pick up from internal linking is really important to us… with that kind of anchor text, that text around the links. That’s really important to us.”
So don’t sleep on internal link building because if it’s important for Google, it should be important for you as well.
Let me show you a quick example with my Google penalty checker page which has internal links from various pages-
These links are using the exact anchor text “Google penalty checker” which is helping the page to rank #1 in Google for the same term-
This is just one of the ways we can take advantage of internal linking!
But we can use them for so much more than just SEO-
Google’s discovers new websites/pages in a number of ways, although most pages are almost certainly discovered via crawling.
Matt Cutts explains more about the crawling process in this video-
Here’s a practical demonstration of how Google uses crawling to discover new web pages:
Right now, Google has 414 pages from my blog in their index
(hint: you can check the indexation status of your website with a site: search in Google).
I know my blog pretty well (obviously)…
So I know that 414 pages = pretty much all the pages on my blog.
Great, so that’s Google’s work done right!?
Not so fast.
Google knows websites change all the time.
For example, you may periodically change the content on your ‘about us’ page or write a brand new blog post every few days.
So they have to constantly re-crawl websites/web pages to look for new content.
This is where internal links come in.
Google relies on internal links to discover new content.
This works because whenever you add a new page/post to your website it’ll almost always be linked-to from somewhere on your website.
For example, whenever I publish a new blog post it automatically apears on my homepage-
Because Google has already indexed my main blog page (and category pages), their crawler will follow that internal link to discover my latest blog post.
Like I said, most content management systems (e.g. Wordpress) add internal links to new pages/posts automatically but these aren’t always in the best location for SEO purposes.
This is why you need a smart internal linking strategy (more on this later!)
It’s rumoured that the number of internal links pointing to a web page…
Is one of Google’s 200+ ranking factors!
In fact: Google themselves have stated that…
“The number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the relative importance of that page.”
They have since deleted that rather unusual specific advice but here it is for your reference-
There have also been a number of case studies whereby a smart internal linking strategy has resulted in HUGE ranking boosts
I’m talking about a 40% increase in traffic. And position #33 to #5.
All using nothing but smart internal linking.
But, why would this be a ranking factor?
Google uses the number of internal links to figure out how important that page may be.
For example, I link to my SEO portal from within my main navigation bar… (Which is present on every page of my website)
This tells Google that I deem this content to be of high importance.
And if I think this page is important, chances are that other people will too.
It passes more ‘link juice’ meaning that it’ll be more authoritative in Google’s eyes.
Here’s a good video showing how ‘link juice/flow’ works:
This helps Google to understand what that particular web page is about.
For example, in one of my income reports…
I link to my SEMRush review with the anchor text ‘SEMRush review’.
In Google’s eyes, this helps reinforce what that page is about (i.e. a review of SEMRush) and helps them feel more confident about ranking it for SEMRush-related terms.
In fact:
I dont like to leave any room for misinterpretation-
In simple terms:
The anchor text you use for internal links is an important ranking factor.
And if you’re worried about being penalised by Google for manipulating anchor text like this, don’t worry;
Penguin is much more lenient when it comes to internal links.
Internal links provide a navigational aid for real-life visitors to your website.
The links in your navigation menu provide perhaps the most obvious example of this…
They funnel visitors to the most important pages on your website.
But this is also true for internal links within your content.
I funnel visitors to download my intelligent keyword & link building Google sheets using an internal link in my link building strategies roundup.
But why do I do this?
Because it makes me more money.
Not only does it drive new email subscribers while providing a ton of value for my visitors…
(Or at least I hope it does!), the manual to use it contains affiliate links.
Strategically sending my traffic to this page results in more email signups, affiliate conversions and therefore, more money (ka-ching!)
Here are a few ways you can use internal links to make more money:
Note: The use of strategically placed internal links will help reduce bounce rate.
This can have some SEO benefit and indirectly increase revenue.
Why?
Because a type of bounce rate is likely used as a Google ranking factor if people click back to the SERPs after visiting your site.
So while bounce rate is not a direct ranking metric…
It indicates people are not engaging with your content.
A lower bounce rate may mean you rank higher and therefore lead to more organic traffic.
OK, enough talk…
It’s time to build some strategic, rank boosting, revenue-increasing internal links.
Here are the 3 processes I’m going to walk you through:
Let’s go through each one step-by-step.
When it comes to SEO…
Time = Money.
This is because the longer one task takes, the less time you have to spend on other important tasks (this is known as opportunity cost).
My 3-step quick ‘n’ dirty process can be implemented super-quickly…
Yet it still leads to incredible results!
Note: This method only works for Wordpress-based websites.
Here’s the basic process:
Make sure you click on File > Make A Copy or File > Download As before continuing.
I recommend making a copy of the sheet above before you begin.
Let’s get started.
Some of you will already have a list of URLs mapped to primary keywords.
If so, fantastic – paste them into the first tab of your Google Sheet (this is the one titled: ‘#1 – URLs / Keywords’) and jump straight to step #2.
If not you can use either SEMRush (click here for a free 14-day trial).
But first, you need to gather a list of URLs from your website.
If you have a sitemap (which you should)…
You can simply copy/paste the list of URLs from the sitemap into the sheet.
But if not, here’s another super-quick way to do this:
Go to Google and search for the following:
site:yourdomain.com
This will return a list of all the pages on your website.
I also recommend setting the number of results per page to 100 under ‘search settings’:
You can then use this free Chrome bookmarklet to scrape all 100 results from the SERPs.
Paste these into the URLs column in the Google Sheet.
Next, use this SEMRush trial to extract the keywords.
Just go to the URL report (under Organic Research) in SEMRush.
Paste the first URL from your Google Sheet into the search bar.
Click Search.
Scroll down and you should see a list of organic search keywords for that page.
Click Export.
Open the .csv in Excel, then copy/paste the list of keywords into this free tool.
This will convert the list of keywords into a comma-separated list.
Copy the comma-separated list into the ‘primary keywords’ column in your Google Sheet.
Rinse and repeat for the rest of the URLs on your list.
“LSI keywords” is really just a technical term form “related keywords” and while there is much debate about how useful they are for optimising content…
…they are a great source to find related keywords we can use to build internal links!
For example, if we take the keyword ‘product launch formula’…
An LSI keyword could be:
And because you’ve already got a list of keywords for each of your URLs…
Finding LSI keywords should be a breeze!
Start by brainstorming related keywords. Add them to your spreadsheet.
Still, brainstorming will only get you so far. So here are a couple of other methods:
Copy one of the keywords from your Google Sheet and paste it into Google.
Scroll to the bottom of the results page and you should see a list of related searches.
Copy relevant keywords into the LSI Keywords column in your Google Sheet
Note: not all keywords will be relevant, so be picky!
Rinse and repeat for the rest of the keywords (and for all the URLs) on your list.
To find LSI keywords easily you can use LSIGraph…
Go to LSIGraph.com and paste in a keyword from your spreadsheet.
Then click Generate.
It should then find and kick back a bunch of LSI keywords.
Add any relevant ones to the LSI Keywords column in your spreadsheet.
Then repeat for each keyword on your list.
Good news: most of the hard work is done. SEO Auto Linker will handle pretty much everything from here.
I know the plugin hasn’t been updated for a long time, but it’s what I use and I can only share what I do with you.
But first things first…
You need to install the plugin.
Once installed, go to the plugin page in your WP dashboard and click Add New Link.
Next, go back to your Google Sheet and select the tab labeled ‘#2 – For WP’.
This sheet pulls all of the keywords you entered into a neat list.
This can then paste into Wordpress.
All you have to do is select a URL from the dropdown.
Copy/paste the URL keywords from the ‘COPY ME’ column into SEO Auto Linker.
Like this:
Click Save.
SEO Auto Linker will comb through your website looking for occurrences of those keywords in other posts/pages.
If it finds any, it’ll automagically add an anchored link to your specific blog post.
Note: I usually set the Links per Page option to 1, as I don’t want a ton of links on every page – that just looks spammy.
SEO Auto Linker works well – the only issue is that you don’t have full control over exactly where these links are placed, as the plugin decides this for you.
In my opinion, it’s much better to do this manually.
That way, you can control exactly where the internal links are placed and ensure they:
Here’s how to do it manually:
I’m not going to go over gathering URLs and primary keywords again.
Simply use the methods laid out earlier in the post to do this.
However, I have created an alternate Google Sheet for this process! So I recommend making a copy of this and using it-
Make sure you click on File > Make A Copy or File > Download As before continuing.
Here’s how it should look when you have your URLs + keywords entered:
Next just click the buttons it generates or if you want to do it manually for any reason you can head to Google and search for-
To find all the pages from your site that Google thinks are relevant to a particular topic.
I’m aware that performing this search correctly over and over can be a bit of a hassle.
Thats why I built the Google Sheet above to make things super straightforward.
Just go to the 2nd tab of the sheet named ‘#2 – For Google’. Select the URL you’re building internal links to from the dropdown list. Then hit the ‘Click here’ button.
This will take you straight to the Google search – no hassle!
If I was looking to build some internal links to my product launch formula case study.
I would select that URL in the spreadsheet (see above), open the Google search results and then pluck out any pages that would make sense to add internal links from.
Here’s a page that fits the bill:
So now, simply read through the post and look for appropriate places to internally link.
This looks like a good place:
Next, I simply login to my WP dashboard and add a link in that location.
Here’s the final result:
Note: I only recommend adding 1 link per page, so when you’re done, head back to the SERPs and look for more internal linking opportunities.
Rinse and repeat this process for each page on your website.
Important tip: Do this process every time you publish a new blog post or web page on your website. Not only will this lead to Google indexing the page much quicker, it’ll also give it a much needed ranking boost.
Is there a particular page you want to rank above all others…
Yet it’s nowhere to be seen in the SERPs?
If so… you need my power process.
Here’s how it works:
That’s it!
Here’s how to do it:
Let’s say I wanted to boost rankings for my SEO audit case study and tutorial. I would first need to find relevant, powerful pages on my website. Ahrefs can help with this.
Go to Ahrefs Site Explorer and enter your domain.
Choose the ‘Best By Links’ report from the ‘Pages’ section on the left-hand menu.
This will show you a list of the most powerful pages on your website.
Ordered by # of referring domains (i.e. backlinks).
In general, more backlinks = more power.
Make a note of any pages that you could potentially add an internal link from.
Make sure they’re relevant!
Right away, my ecommerce SEO tutorial stands out.
With 177 referring domains, it’s certainly powerful. And because every ecommerce site needs a lot of on site work…
This is the perfect page from which to mention (and add a link to) my on page SEO audit tutorial.
I mean – it doesn’t get much easier than this!
Here is how I placed the link-
Adding a relevant internal link like this gives the page a huge authority boost.
But there’s no need to stop there; keep working your way down the list of top pages on Ahrefs – there may be other pages you can add an internal links to.
This will give the page even more of a boost!
A week before I was about to publish this, I was pitched a new plugin called Link Whisper.
Now I get pitched things all the time, but this is made by the same guy that made LongTailPro (see my Long Tail Pro review) which was the king of keyword research tools for a long time.
And I have been so impressed with it I halted post and video production to talk about it because I will be using it on all of my sites going forward – I’m already using it on the blog.
Unlike dumb plugins that just replace keywords and phrases you specify with internal links, Link Whisper actually analsyes all of the text across your site to come up with it’s own intelligent suggestions.
The best way to show you how this works is with an example.
Let’s say I just published my keyword research template and now I want to build internal links to it. I can just open LinkWhisper-
Which tells me I have zero internal links pointing to it currently.
All you have to do is click Add and LinkWhisper will make intelligent suggestions automatically-
It’s making some pretty decent suggestions off the bat.
But what make’s it really cool is how you can customise those suggestions-
That makes it really easy to build smart, manual internal links without any hard work at all.
Just review the suggestions, click to easily add/remove words from the anchor text and click “Add Links” – that’s it!
Not only that but it also includes some pretty awesome reporting features-
At the moment I am using all of the methods I have listed above and it’s very likely that Link Whisper will replace the manual part of it.
I am already using it on this blog and have deployed it on a couple of niche sites to experiment more but it’s the best internal linking plugin I have ever used.
Internal linking is a great way to boost your website performance but it’s not the only way. Check out my SEO checklist and learn 45+ ways to optimize your site this year.
Internal linking is crazily powerful – don’t neglect it!
Plus, unlike regular ol’ link building strategies (from external websites)…
Internal links are under your full control.
You can decide:
Given the fact you can implement a smart internal linking strategy within a few hours…
I strongly recommend you give this a shot right now.
But remember: every time you add an internal link to one of your posts, submit your URL to Google.
If you don’t know how to do that, consult my search engine submission guide – NO SEO submission software required.
It is extremely important because it’s like telling Google that you’ve made some changes and that your URL needs to be indexed again.
And while you are reviewing your internal linking structure, you might want to pay attention to canonicalization as well!
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It is nice to learn more about internal linking. We often forget the many places that we can link to.
The great think about internal linking is that you have total control
Fantastic post. I’m going to implement each tactic step by step and hopefully improve my ranking. Thanks Matthew
No problem!
Hey Matthew,Thanks for the article. I came to know some new tricks which I’ll implement on my website. Looking forward to more SEO and link building tips.
No problem, good luck with implimenting
Fantastic post! useful information about the link building This is very insightful. Thanks for sharing,
Thanks Miguel
Thanks for the actionable tips. I was not familiar with the tool you mentioned, SEO Auto Linker. Will definitely check it out.I’ve been using internal linking but need to be more strategic about it.Thanks againLisa
You are welcome Lisa
What a Great Blog it is! Internal link building is very helpful for getting more traffic to websites as well as ranking a website or blog in the Google. Thanks for sharing such a good techniques of building backlinks.
No problem, it’s all about the right technique
WOW, Great and useful content.thanks to shear
Happy to do so
WOW! I get new trick.Thanks for your internal link building strategy. 🙂
You’re welcome
Hey…! Very nice useful Information.I have learnt new tricks by this article.
Hope you put what you learnt to good use
Thanks for the article. I’m following it step by step to increase my internal linking. The part where you can make a bookmarklet for to get all the links of your site didn’t work for me. Google Chrome doesn’t seem to accept the javascript code. So, I decided to build a quick tool that would just go over all your sitemaps (the parent + children) and print out all your links.I think this tool can benefit your readers, so if you want to include it in your post, here it is: https://studiowombat.com/get-overview-of-internal-links/If I run your site, I’m only getting 259 links though, as opposed to the 500+ links Google finds for your website. Do you have any idea how come? I guess some links are not in your SiteMap (they are private but crawled by google?)Anyway, would love to hear what you think of the little tool :-)Kind regardsMaarten
Nice tool!Well yes not all of them are in my sitemap but I have at least 300 posts published in the sitemap
its very good article
Thanks Jaspreet!
It is Fabulous Information
No worrys 🙂
thank you so much for this article! It’s so detailed and easy to understand. Really appreciate it!
No problem Ida
am i the first one to comment here? always powerful stuff. love the wp plugin recommendation to change keyword into internal link. one question though, when plugin deactivate, does the internal link stay or come back to keyword? guess i’ll have to find out..
No I was just slow on approvals hahahaIf you decativate the plugin the link is removed
Great article sir.. I think its time for me to focus more on my internal link than external link to other domain. Since i am new to this, i will fully follow your guide here to get better understanding how internal link work.
No problem let us know how you get on!
One of the best article for seo learning
Thanks Anuj
I get some new tricks from this post,I always apply internal linking but not the way you do it .Its awesome.
Glad you enjoyed it!
This appears to be a great strategy but i just checked on one of my clients sites to be able to get one of his harder to rank pages higher up and its telling me in my ahrefs that ahrefs hasn’t crawled the site yet
That’s weird, what about SEMRush?
the thoughts are good but be practical and why semrush,com not have a free tool for beginers
They have the trial
Great article. Internal linking has helped me give my readers easy resource for further reading. It will give you few more traffic and less bounce rate.
No problem 🙂
Internal linking and bulding long tail based on internal linking is the most powerful trick 🙂
Not the most powerful, but definitely powerful!
Any suggestions? Because this SEO Auto Linker plugin seems not to be supported anymore.Only just come across your site, and good info. Just wished this plugin was in date.
I tried all of these types of plugins and that was the best one, even if not updated for a while
Wow.This is very insightful.7Thanks for sharing,Ama start implementing internal links on my blog.
No worrys 🙂
U smart alec
Haha thanks
Nice link building tips Matthew. i will implement your strategies on my site.looking forward to more SEO and link building tips.Thanks!!
No problem 🙂
This is really a great tutorial matt. I also want to ask if it is possible to use another software for LSI and the one i can use easily?
You could look at LSIGraph.com
useful information about the link building strategy…..
Thanks Gautam 🙂
Great post! I read that SEO Auto Linker plugin hasn’t been updated in two years and has been causing issues. Is there any alternatives that you’re aware of?
Yes but they are not as good
Fantastic post. I’m going to implement each tactic step by step and hopefully improve my ranking. Thanks Matthew
No problem Luis!
Ever since i started to look for steps to increase my Google ranking through Link building, I have never come across such an important post.Keep doing what you know to do best Matthew.
I will try my best!
These are some good techniques for links building I have already on it applying them for my website. good work
Thanks!
Useful article, I will apply this knowledge in my website soon. But I wonder which method is more effective? Many internal links to one post or few external links to one post.
Many 🙂
The best I red about Internal Linking. Detailed information. Good luck dude!
I always go for the best 🙂
Excellent . So far I ignored the potential of Internal Links but now I realized their power. They have tremendous potential as an SEO tool. Thank you for sharing such a wonderful article.
Like it says….. incredible results… not to be ignored. Thanks
i dont value internal linking that much before,but after coming accross this article,i see that its of high value.i think i will try it,thanks for the article
You’re welcome
This is detailed explained , I`m already doing this for my website not quite same but similar and I can confirm that this is working really nice.
Thanks for the input, good to know
Hey, came here from one of your facebook sponsored links. It’s really an insightful article. I was doing good Internal link building. BUt, I got more knowledge here and will apply to all my upcoming posts. Thank you for sharing!
Cheers Juhil, you should see a difference
this nice blog and thanks for provide seo knowledge. its very use full webmaster
Thanks Nancy
Very nice and informative article… Thanq very much
No problem
nice
Thanks
Great articulo man. It had not be an text, was an adveture for me. Ho ahead!. Grettings from spain
Yes, internal linking is powerful for ranking. your tutorial is awsome too
Great feedback thanks Usama
The informativeness of this post is second to none. Thank you matthew.
Great feedback thanks Jamie
Great strategies and i have found your post very informative! Thanks for this! . Keep up the great work!
Pleased it was of use
Great post again Matthew!Internal Linking is one of the most underrated and a highly useful link building thing to rank websites in today’s modern era of google rankings.Just like you say the strongest backlink that you can get is a pbn because there you have full control over the anchor text, the content etc.Same is the case with internal links. Here you can write unlimited related topically relevant posts and adjust anchor text that will increase your rankings.Keep Sharing awesome stuffs, MatthewThanks Aman
Hey Aman, all good points, see you soon
Wow! Again excellent article
Thanks for coming back Amrit
That is interesting. I will start taking internal linking more seriously. Thanks for the step-by-step guide on each of the strategies by the way.
Thanks Chris and no problem
Wow! Thank’s a lot for this killer post!Couldn’t think about outer world till it’s end…. I would love to comeback with a few question later…. This is incredibly one of the best post about internal link building. :-))
Thanks very much Rashed and feel free to ask any questions you have here
Wow – amazing content. Internal links are a bit like the forgotten sibling to link building. I always create internal links as I create content but some the techniques here are awesome. Many thanks for such a practical article.
Hey Alison, no problem, thanks for your comment
Thanks for your article. It confirms that I was doing the right thing. I have also seen some great results using internal link building. Glad you agree
Great minds think alike Stephanie