Why You Should Be Internally Linking In Your Blog Posts

Affiliate links | Hey, hey, hey! How are you? I feel like I haven’t wrote a blog post advice kinda post in a long ass time. I definitely feel like in terms of my content, lately I’ve been focusing more on the well-being and personal growth side of my niche. I still love sharing blogging advice though and will continue to do so whenever I have something I feel is valuable to share! Which is the purpose of today’s post on WHY you should be internally linking in your blog posts.

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

SEO and getting ALL THE TRAFFIC is really “in” right now. Honestly, I’ve never seen so many tweets in my life in such a short space of time about SEO, Pinterest and tips and techniques to grow your blog traffic. Everyone is on a traffic overdrive, it seems. But, if you want to grow your blog, grow your audience and even potentially earn money from it then traffic is definitely important.

Internally linking in your blog posts is something that will come up when you search for SEO advice because it’s an important aspect of SEO. I’ve always internally linked within my own blog posts – even before I knew ANYTHING about SEO – because it just made sense to me to do so.

This post is only going to cover this one aspect of SEO but if you’re ready to really dive deep into SEO, I’d highly recommend checking out these eBooks from The Navigatio – who seriously knows her stuff when it comes to SEO!

So today let’s talk about internally linking, why it’s important and why you should DEFINITELY start doing it!

What does it mean to internally link within a blog post?

Internally linking within a blog post means to link to other content from your OWN site within a blog post. You’ll notice above that I linked to my Pinterest account and to my Beginners Guide To Growing a Following eBook. Those are external links, as they’re taking you to pages outside of this blog.

Internally linking would be if I were talking about SEO and broken links, I could then internally link to my own blog post from a couple of months back that I wrote specifically about broken links. You’ll see this broken link example a lot in this post – sorry!

Is there a right or wrong way to internally link?

Yes and no. For the sake of SEO (here we go again), it’s worth trying to internally link using key words. By this I mean, not internally linking your post to the word “here”. For example:

“Click here for more information about broken links”

The word “here” isn’t a key word but “broken links” could be. Google and search engines are more likely to notice you linking to key words and it’ll boost your SEO efforts that little bit more instead of linking to seemingly irrelevant words, like “here”. In terms of layout of your blog post, people like to internally link in 2 ways mostly. Example 1:

“Check out this blog post I wrote last week on broken links for more information!”

In this example, the internal link fits naturally within the sentence. Or example 2:

“Related: A Beginners Guide To Broken Links“

In this example, the link is usually placed in it’s own sentence within a related blog post. For example, you wouldn’t say “Related: 7 Reasons To Start Yoga”, within a blog post about broken links because it’s not related. But anyway, these are 2 easy examples on how to internally link. I use both, depending on the blog post. But it’s more so example one.

Other things to remember when it comes to internally linking:

• Try and link near the top of your post. If some people don’t finish reading your blog post then your links are at the top and they’ll be more likely to click on them.
• Not too much, not too little. Think about Goldilocks here. You don’t want to not be internally linking enough because that way, search engines might not recognize them. Too much and it might be considered spam. Around 4/5 internal links in a post is sufficient enough.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Why should I be internally linking?

It creates a better reader experience

By internally linking to more of your relevant content, it provides the reader with a more useful experience. If they’re reading a blog post on SEO and see you’ve linked to another blog post about broken links and another one about key words and another one about something else related, they’ll know you know what you’re talking about and that you have more useful content for them.

It boosts your SEO

Internal linking is such a easy way to boost your SEO. First of all because it’s entirely within your control. You don’t have to rely on other sites to link to yours to show Google that your content is relevant. You can do that yourself! By internally linking to your other content, it shows Google that you content is relevant. This is where the keyword thing comes in too.

The more posts on your blog with related links to OTHER posts on your blog, the higher your chances are for search engines to find you. Woopie! Internally linking is not enough to send your SEO sky-rocketing though. There’s loads of other practices you have to put in place to establish a good SEO strategy for your blog. Internally linking is a good place to start.

For more help on SEO, I’d suggest following Nele on Twitter, who is full of tips and advice on SEO!

It keeps people on your site for longer

Handy for your bounce rate and building up a relationship with your readers, internal linking is great for keeping people on your site for longer. If they love what they’re already reading and see you’ve linked to something else that they might be interested in, chances are, they’ll click on it there and then.

And following on from that, it also makes things super easy for the reader. Back to the example of the blog post about SEO. If you simply MENTION that you’ve written another blog post with more information about broken links, readers are much, much, much less likely to go searching for it themselves compared to if you provide a link there for them.

This is a very basic guide on why you should be internally linking in your blog posts but hopefully has given you a good insight to help you start! Do you internally link?