Internal link building is an SEO strategy that is often neglected but by far, it’s the most beneficial & requires least to no effort.
The sad part 😥.
It’s most neglected.
This strategy doesn’t require anyone to be an expert, nor does it requires dependency on other bloggers as in the case of the external link-building process.
Moreover, it’s completely FREE & it benefits all sorts of websites ranging from small to giant ones.
In this article, I’ll discuss the WordPress internal linking process, & also present a deep case study on:
“How Spencer’s Website Went From 1200 To 6000 PageViews/Day In Just 2 Months Just By Adding Internal Links”
But before discussing the entire process, let’s discuss whether is it even beneficial to spend your precious time & efforts on this SEO strategy or is it just an hoax.
What Is An Internal Link?
An internal link is any type of connection from one page on your site to another.
Both humans and search engines use links in order to navigate through a website or find content that they are looking for.
People will click the links so as to get around the site easier, while bots scan them trying to make sense out of what’s going on within it; if there aren’t enough connections between pages then this task becomes difficult at best.
8 Powerful Reasons Why Should You Be Building Internal Links?
Internal links are the key to making your blog posts rank higher.
The more links you have on a page, the easier it is for Google to find those pages.
Building internal links can be easy and fun!
In this section, I’ll go over 8 powerful reasons why you should be building internal links.
Revive Your Older Content To Get More Traffic & Maximize Revenue
It’s likely that a lot of your older posts are no longer ranking on the search engine or getting traffic.
You can promote these old posts by linking to them from new content you publish about similar topics, which will send more readers their way and increase those original posts.
So, there are chances of being found again in an online search results list.
Increase On-Page Duration & Decrease Your Bounce Rates
The more time people spend on your website, the better.
A low bounce rate means you’re doing something right and it can have a huge impact on search rankings.
Visitors leave a site when they don’t find what they want to see immediately—but that’s not always their fault!
So make sure there are internal links pointing to other important pages so visitors will stay longer than five seconds before taking off again or clicking “back.”
Help Search Engines Crawl Your Site Effortlessly
Your website is a living and breathing entity, constantly changing.
Search engines use crawlers to explore your website and gather information about it.
They are going to visit all of the pages on your site, following each link they can find in order to discover new content that might be missing from their catalogs.
Building a strong internal architecture will help these crawlers navigate deep into your site where not everything is always visited by users but still needs attention because it’s important for SEO purposes as well!
Internal links help search engine bots easy access through navigating with ease- you’re really giving them a hand when you create opportunities.
Pass Link Equity & Page Authority Throughout Your Website
Every link carries equity also called link juice.
Link juice contains a number of elements, mainly the value, trustworthiness, topic relevance, and authoritativeness of a page.
And it’s transferable throughout pages via internal linking.
Links that pass this quality are one of many signals that Google uses to evaluate and determine your rankings in SERPs.
For example, You have an article with good rankings on google; and if it has outgoing internal links to other pages of your website, chances are that Google will also increase their rankings in the SERPs.
Strengthen Your SEO
Without a doubt, internal links can build your SEO.
When search engine spiders find your site they follow links to discover additional pages on the website you’re linking them to.
The logical process of building an effective and visually appealing link structure is easy with some help from great tools like Link Whisper, which also makes this whole endeavor much more accessible for those who want to automate link building process without putting in effort or wasting any more time.
Related: 13+ Image SEO & Optimization Tips That’ll Definitely 17X Your Blog Traffic
Strengthen Your Site Architecture & Foundation
When it comes to websites, a strong foundation structure is built by having a good internal linking strategy.
You need to make sure that you have great content on your website for people so they will enjoy the experience and trust what you are selling them.
A building’s strength lies in its foundation; this analogy applies when looking at how the architecture (or structure) of a website works as well!
And to strengthen your foundation, internal links play an important role.
Make A Point For Your Readers
With the help of Internal Links, you can allow your readers to dive deep into the topic you’re talking about.
Suppose, you’ve 2 articles on the topic of Email Marketing.
You can connect these 2 articles by placing internal links wherever you feel it’s relevant.
Internal links pass link value to other important pages on your website & help satisfy your readers to a greater extent.
Improve PageRank
Before explaining why internal linking helps increase PageRank, let’s define what the PageRank is.
Google has developed a metric to measure how important web pages are based on their backlink count and score from 0-10.
The higher your rank, the more important people attribute to you as an authority in that topic or industry!
The higher the PageRank, the more you can take advantage of linking to other sites and spreading link juice.
This will help your own site with its authority as well as a boost in rankings on Google SERPS because it has received an increased amount of internal links.
How To Build Internal Links In WordPress Websites?
Internal links are the cornerstone of SEO.
If you have a blog or a simple website, then you’ll want to build some internal links on your website.
Here are my favorite 2 methods that I use & recommend to my readers.
Starting with the first manual method:
Manual Method (Time Consuming)
Go to Google search & type the following into your search box:
yourdomain.com + “keyword”
Enter the keyword you’re targeting to build links to it.
Let’s take an example of my site.
Suppose I want to build internal links to the keyword “Email Marketing”.
I’ll go to google search & type: themistakenman.com + “email marketing”:
Now Google search will show me all the instances/pages where this keyword has been used on my entire website.
Next, I’ll go to each & every single page & will place my internal links to that particular anchor text or keyword.
Now, this process is pretty time-consuming & hectic too.
Moreover, Google will also only show you the exact match of your keyword but fails to highlight the similar LSI keywords that you might want to link to as well.
For Ex. For the above search “email marketing” Google will show the exact match of the word, but what if there’s an article on my blog as “how to write an email with 70% open rates”.
In this case, Google search won’t show me any suggestions & I would need to change my query multiple times to find all the internal linking opportunities on my blog.
Automated Method (Time Saving & Efficient)
The automated method is quite beneficial, more efficient & is able to give results almost instantly.
For this automated process, you need to use a plugin named Link Whisper.
Link Whisper plugin is an AI-based tool that scans your website for all the possible internal linking opportunities & then suggests you accordingly to build internal links to & from a particular blog post of your choice.
Let’s see the real benefits & whether this plugin is worthy of your time or not.
To ease things up for you, I’m going to present a case study done by Spencer Haws for his website using Link Whisper Tool.
You can also watch the video below:
Spencer added that before conducting his experiment on a new blog post,
- It had no incoming internal links & his page was an orphan page (the page that has no incoming internal links).
- No External Link Building was done during this experiment to any part of the site.
- The experiment was started on Jan 8 & ran for 6 months straight.
In his Link Whisper dashboard, he shows his blog that has no incoming internal links.
You can just click Add & it’ll show you all the suggestions.
Moreover, Spencer monitored & tracked this experiment for 6 months straight & he has collected all that data into a spreadsheet which is mentioned below.
Here’s the link to the spreadsheet.
The results on the spreadsheet might intimidate you & it’s nearly impossible to analyze that data in a blink of an eye.
So, let me present you with a data format that’ll make data absorption & processing easy for you.
In this experiment, after adding a total of 108 internal links to 47 articles on Spencer’s blog named OwnTheYard.com:
- 76.6% of the added interlinks via Link Whisper improved google rankings
- 14.9% of the rankings stayed the same, while
- 8.5% of the posts rank declined in Google SERPs.
The number of interlinks that he added to each of his posts is highlighted in the graph below:
Clearly from the data, we can analyze that:
On an avg. he added 2.3 internal links to each of his blog posts.
Some of the blogs contained 8 to 9 internal links, but the majority no. of the internal links he added to his post were between 2 & 3 new internal links per blog post.
Let’s see about his google rankings.
As you can see from the chart above, out of 47 blog posts, all blog posts have got increased rankings except 2, which is great.
Also by using Link Whisper to build internal links, a few of his rankings shifted upwards by more than 100 positions which is pretty MIND-BLOWING.
Also, Spencer shared his traffic stats at the end of his experiment.
Spencer adds that traffic has gone up quite gracefully on his site OwnTheYard.com.
Before this experiment, he used to get around 1200 pageviews/day but after building 108 internal links to 47 posts with the Link Whisper plugin, he gets around 6000 pageviews/day in just 2 months.
That’s INSANE.
That’s an improvement of 400% or 5X in his traffic in just 2 months.
All thanks to Link Whisper WordPress Internal Links plugin.
There are other factors too like social shares & everything else, but yeah, the traffic spike is great here.
You can clearly see the benefits of using Internal links in your WordPress website.
That’s the power of creating internal links on your website with Link Whisper.
Best Practices For Creating Efficient WordPress Internal Links
Creating relevant internal links is an art & not everybody is an artist.
So to aid you with this often neglected SEO strategy, I’ve some important tips for you that you should implement in your inter-linking process.
Let The Internal Links Be Natural
Forcing Internal Links in a blog post isn’t considered a good practice at all.
If you’re placing internal links just for the sake of inserting them, your site will start to lose credibility & soon get outranked.
Google focuses more on relevancy & authority.
So, place your internal links more often where it’s relevant to both the user & search engines.
Put people first & google will rank you higher automatically.
Use Keyword Rich & Exact Match Anchor Text
It’s hard to rank high on Google without using some keywords in your anchor text.
If you want users and the search engine itself to understand that a page is about certain keywords, then put those same keywords as part of an internal link.
However, it can look spammy if all of them are exact matches–especially when there aren’t many other types mixed into the mix!
That said: don’t worry about too much because this type of usage typically won’t hurt you (Google has even endorsed it).
But I like sticking with what doesn’t make me look spammy since we should always err on the side of caution—just for peace of mind.
Avoid Using Same Anchor Text For More Than One Page
As explained in the above section, using the same anchor text over & again for the different internal link can look spammy.
Moreover it confuses Google.
Try to mix things up a little bit.
Focus more on LSI keywords to build internal links.
Frequently Audit Your Internal Links With SEO Tool
Did you know that Google is constantly crawling the web and updating its database of websites?
This means your website will always be changing, so it’s important to continually audit all internal links.
Broken internal links will cause your site’s internal linking structure to go bizarre & you could lose a lot of potential traffic.
Try to use internal links audit tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.
These tools help you identify all the internal links, their status, how are they performing & whether they need to be repaired or not.
Personally, I prefer using Semrush because it has a pretty sleek & user-friendly interface that helps me understand & analyze the details about my site.
Don’t Add No Follow Or Sponsored Tags To Your Internal Links
The most common mistake that I see people make is that they add sponsored or nofollow tags to their internal links.
Adding one of these 2 tags instructs the search engines not to crawl that particular internal link, which will add no benefit to creating of internal links at all.
So, always prefer no to add this nofollow or sponsored tags to your internal links.
Add More Internal Links To Your Older Content
Adding more outgoing internal links from your fresh content to your older content brings it to life & also helps that older content to rank higher in search results.
This way you get more additional traffic & also increased revenue too.
Link More To Transactional Keyword Blog Posts To Maximize Your Affiliate Earnings
If you’re into affiliate space & monetize your blog through affiliate marketing then following this strategy will help you maximize your revenue 10X folds.
For. ex in your fresh blog named, “How To Do E-mail Marketing”, you can place an internal link to your transactional blog post named “Best E-mail Marketing Softwares”“.
By creating a mix of posts like educational & transactional, you can interlink both of these & increase your affiliate earnings too.
Internally Link Content Strategically On Your Home Page
The homepage is the most visited & therefore is the highest authority page of your website.
The outgoing internal links that you create on this page should point to the most important & meaningful content on your site.
You shouldn’t create any outgoing internal links from your homepage to irrelevant or less meaningful content on your website as not only it will hurt your site’s reputation, but also the link juice will go wasted on your meaningless content.
If possible, try to mix placing internal links of both transactional & informative posts on your homepage so that the link value passes to all your main stuff.
And adding internal links to your transactional posts will also increase your affiliate earnings.
Look Out For Broken WordPress Internal Links & Repair Them
As said earlier, keep an eye on the broken links.
Use SEO tools like Semrush to monitor them & repair them when feels necessary.
Broken internal links will degrade your internal link structure, so make sure you’re paying proper attention to them as well.
General FAQ’s On Building WordPress Internal Links
What Is An Internal Link In WordPress?
Internal links can be a great way to help your website visitors find what they are looking for.
Links give both humans and search engines the ability to travel through websites easily while also locating specific content that is relevant or desired.
How Do I Find Internal Links Opportunities In WordPress?
To find internal link opportunities, you can use google advanced search operators, Ahrefs webmaster tools, or Link Whisper Plugin.
Link Whisper is really cool and I’m so glad to have it.
It’s an AI that scans my whole site, finds the links on each page (within paragraphs), then creates a report with recommendations for how many additional outgoing internal links should be made from this content in order to make sure all of those pages are getting their fair share of traffic.
How Do I Create An Internal Link In WordPress Automatically?
Just use the Link Whisper plugin.
The AI built-in to this tool scans your whole site and finds Hidden WordPress Internal Links opportunities for you to build more internal links.
It all takes just a click of the button, with as many recommendations given that may be needed!
With this tool, I managed to build 17 outgoing internal links to my other blog content on my website which is AWESOME.
What Is The Best WordPress Plugin For Building Internal Links?
The best WP plugin to build internal links is Link Whisper. It uses AI built-in to scan your whole site to find internal linking opportunities & then recommends you to build links accordingly.
With just one click, you can add as many internal links to a particular page.
How To Link To Section Of Page In WordPress?
Just follow these steps to create WordPress Internal Links to a section of a page:
Go To that section you want to link to -> On right sidebar -> Go To Advanced -> HTML Anchor -> Add your unique name for that section.
Then just add #unique-section-name after your URL like this:
yourdomain.com/#unique-section-name
You’ll directly land to that section once you click that link.
Is There Any Limit To The Number Of Internal Links I Can Create On A Single Webpage?
Google clearly says that there is no limit on the number of links on a page you create on your webpage to other parts of your website, as long as you’re pointing towards other relevant pages.
Relevancy is the key.
How Can I See The Page’s Strength-Based Upon The Number Of Internal Links It Has?
How Do I Create Internal Links?
Creating Internal Links is pretty easy. If you’re on WordPress follow this step:
Select the text you want to link to -> Click on the link icon -> enter the link you want to link to & hit save.
For non WordPress sites, add this HTML code: <a href=”your-link“>Your Anchor Text</a>
If you want to automate that process, use Link Whisper Plugin
Are Internal Links Backlinks?
In simple words, Internal Links aren’t backlinks but they act like it. If a piece of content on your website has a lot of incoming internal links, then according to SEO, that blog post will rank higher in the SERPs.
So, yes, you can say that internal links are backlinks.
Is Internal Linking Important?
You might not expect it, but the importance of internal linking is essential to any website.
It helps establish site architecture and spread link juice from one page on a domain to another within that same domain.
Simply speaking, internal links are when you get links in your content or navigation bar back onto other pages with keyword phrases throughout them for SEO purposes!
Why Are Links Important To Google?
Google follows links to discover content on websites and rank this content in the search results.
If a post or page gets a lot of external links, then Google will know that it’s an important article and increase its ranking accordingly.
This is also true for internal linking where you can guide visitors with relevant articles by creating high-quality backlinks from other pages within your website – something very much under your control as site owner!
How Do Internal Links Affect SEO?
Using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO! Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website.
They allow you to establish a hierarchy on your site, giving more important pages or posts more link value than other less valuable ones.
How To Audit Your Internal Links For Issues?
You can use SEO tools like Ahrefs & Semrush to get a complete dataset of all the links coming & going out of your website.
Using Google Search Console can also help.
How To Strategically Use Internal Links To Boost Pages?
One of the best ways to promote your landing page on site is through use of internal linking.
This technique requires that you link directly from relevant pages, like your homepage and menu items for example, as well as inserting it where possible with high-value content throughout other webpages in order to make it accessible by a range of visitors who visit different areas within the website at any given time.
Why Are Internal Links Important For SEO?
Internal links are crucial for building the architecture of your site and distributing link equity throughout all pages.
This makes it easier to rank every page on your website, which is a really helpful thing because you want them all ranked as high as possible!
What’s An External Link?
External links, also known as outbound or referrals, direct readers outside of their current domain and link them to other websites.
What Are Internal And External Links?
Internal links are hyperlinks on your site that take the reader to another page of their own website.
External links, which can also be called outbound or referrals, direct readers outside of this domain and link them to other websites.
Conclusion: Building WordPress Internal Links
Internal link building is a strategy that’s often neglected but it has many benefits.
I’m not saying this to scare you or anything, but your internal links hold the power of driving traffic and SEO ranking within search engines.
The sad part?
It’s most neglected—and for no good reason!
This blog post was just meant to help shed some light on why internal linking should be an integral part of your content marketing efforts and how it can save time in the long run when done correctly with a few simple tools like Link Whisper Plugin.
We’ve seen that how much benefit it gave Spencer for his website.
He was able to literally 5X his Page Views in just 2 months with this simple WordPress Internal Links plugin.
So don’t wait any longer!
Get started today by checking out one of these best practices for generating quality Internal backlinks from within your site that will also help strengthen its inner-link structure.
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Till Then, have A Nice Day 🙂