No you won’t go blind linking with yourself but it could be fun. If you have been blogging or involved with the SEO of your own site for any length of time Im sure you have come across the term “Back Linking”. If you havenet it is simply getting links to your site from other sites out there in the intrawebs. Good quality links from good sites are good for your SEO mojo (more on that on another post) but did you know that liking within can be just as helpful and as important.
internal linking is just as you suspect it is, linking to content within your own site and is often missed as a tool to boost your SEO as well as some other benefits:
- Provide additional links to buried posts. Google likes links internal and external!
- Provide paths to some lesser trafficked posts, hopefully bringing them up in stature.
- Providing paths to other material you readers may wish to see, keeping them on your site longer. Google likes lower bounce rates!
- Links to other posts provides search engines more paths to content and helps with indexing. Tells google what you think is important.
Of course just like external linking there is the good side and the dark side, avoid the dark side.
Good Ways to Link Within Your Site
Avoid linking to the same content more than once if you can. Google is going to place the most importance to the first time it is linked, more is not necessarily better in this case. Even to your readers, linking to the same content several times can get repetitive and seem needy. They’ll most likely decide to move on.
Avoid linking to to much content in the same post as well. Just like linking to the same content is a no-no, linking to a dozen older posts is just as bad. You;ll have your reader hoping all over the place and lose them very quickly. One or two internal links from a post is more than enough. Personally I would shot for one or two internal and one external link in your post if you could.
Make one of the internal links in the first paragraph, first sentence even if it fits. be sure it makes sense but any link that is visible when your vistor first hits your page (with out scrolling) will give you maximum SEO juice.
Above all make sure you are linking to content that is relevant to your current post. If you are writing about latest twilight release (and if you are maybe you should stop) you dont want to link to posts about your new puppy, unless you named it bella… well maybe. Goggle is pretty smart and can look at the two and see if they are relevant to each other. Not to mention your readers will for sure ba bale to tell if you are just linking for linking sake
Anchor text, that is the text that will be linking to the old post, should be relevant and make sense in the posts context. Dont just through a link in that dosent read naturally to your visitors. The anchor text should be word(s) that are relevant to both the context of the current post and the one you are linking to.
The Darkside of Linking Within Your Site
You kind of got the idea above I hope of what not to do as well but just in case heres a quick list of what to avoid.
- A dozen links in one post all linking back to the same older post.
- a dozen links in general are to many. Just 2-4 max
- placing all your links at the bottom of your post.
- Anchor text like CLICK HERE
- Linking for the sake of linking. Make your links relavant to your post
Random concluding thoughts
Linking within your own site can be one of the easiest SEO techniques for those that blog and yet it also the most under utilized. I’m guilty of it myself, I often to forget to see if there is a way for me to link back to an old post or even a page if I cant find a post. Really simple to include at least one link to yourself and the benefits over time
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