Internal linking may seem like a simple practice, but in truth, it can get pretty complicated. No matter how difficult the practice, it is an essential one for great SEO, especially when you rely on your website to generate income (which many freelance translators do).

Today, we’re going to talk you through the importance of internal linking, plus how to best internally link to reap the rewards of SEO for marketing.

What is internal linking?

For anyone who may be unfamiliar, internal linking is a way of connecting one page of your site with another. The key piece of information here is that the two pages are from the same website. Of course, you can link to a page from a different website, but that would be considered external linking. Today, we’re talking about internal linking.

Why is internal linking so important?

Internal linking has several great benefits for marketing.

On a more practical side, internal linking helps users navigate your website. If a user reads a post via a google search and wants to learn more about your site after reading, a clear link to your ‘About Us’ page will help them find what they are looking for.  

In terms of your success, however, internal linking helps to boost your website views. Yes, there are practical searches to some of the key pages, like ‘About Us’ or ‘Get in Contact,’ but there are also benefits from internal linking to other blog posts.

If a reader is reading a post on small business marketing, you might want to internally link to another of your posts on choosing the headlines for online marketing. You can see now how internal linking can keep users on your site, reading post after post. As a result, your views will rise, and you may find you gain more regular visitors or even more email subscribers.

For those who have blogs as a part of their online business, this increase in views will also translate into sales. For marketers, building trust through well-written and well-linked blogposts will cause more viewers to trust your skills as a marketer when they are looking to employ someone for marketing help.

How does internal linking affect SEO?

Internal linking helps SEO because google tends to rank internally linked pages higher. This is believed to be due to the easy paths through a site when it is well internally connected.

So how can you use internal links to best affect SEO?

Frequent content: In order to create the pathways that Google likes so much, you need lots of content that you can link together.

Keywords: Much like how keywords are important for SEO, keywords are also important for internal linking. You want your anchor text to stand out – so your users will want to click on it to read more.

Go deep: Links to the main site can stunt users’ movement. When they get to the homepage, they may feel overwhelmed about where to go next. So instead, you should link to all sorts of pages across your site – from years ago, from niche topics. By doing this, you keep your users interested.