SEO Internal link building explained
Search engines work by following links to quality pages! Each link is a vote for your website. The more votes you have the higher you go up the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
So for example, you have 5 services you sell. Service 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Brilliant 5 well-written pages.
On each page, you link to the 4 other pages 5 x 4 links 20 links
Even better 20 internal links.
But you can do better!
Each service can be added into related categories and sub-categories (Link the categories to each other)
- Geographical Locations
- People / Teams
- Qualifications / Expertise
- Sectors (Education / Property / Leisure etc)
All your services are carried out in a city, town or village for a customer in a location.
- Do you want new customers in these locations?
All your services are provided by People or Teams within your organisation. These people have faces. All your people should be treated as products and have an individual landing page. Don’t dilute them all into one page.
- New customers are looking for people and teams with your companies skills
All your services are completed by people with different skills and qualifications.
- New customers are looking for qualified people and teams with these skills
All your services are provided for people who work within certain industry sectors. Medical, education, law, leisure etc.
- Do you want new customers in these sectors?
Five posts, each in four categories
Create the 4 categories and sub-categories and describe them in more than 400 words.
Create the 5 services (Apples and Pears) as posts.
Put the 5 services into the relevant categories.
Each of the five posts can have up to 20 links. Only use the appropriate categories
100 internal links!!
But you can do even more…
Remember the people and teams.
Each member of staff has a position within your organisation. So…
Add a new category called positions / organisational structure. Take care with the permalinks. People get promoted, move on or retire. The ones that leave will remove a link but their position is still there. Also some people have more than one role within a company.
125 internal links from just 5 posts!!
In conclusion, if your website has 1000 posts this is 125,000 potential internal links maybe you have less than 3,000 from your posts at the moment. So the above is worth considering?
Well organised categories that are linked to each other have the added bonus of making a website far easier to navigate.
Warning! Don’t use “Click Here” or “Read More”
The anchor text of your hyperlink should not say “Click Here”. Search engines read this text, “Click Here” means nothing. Your internal links should be contextual, “Person A has done project B in Location C” is much better link text it contains important information. Google explains internal linking best practices.