Internal linking is when you create a backlink from your website back to your website. In an SEO context it is a way of passing your link juice more efficiently throughout the website. This allows you to use less PBN / Guest post backlinks to rank your site.
Basics of Link Division
First of all you need to understand the pecking order of importance when linking:
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Contextual
These are the internal links within the main body of your texts, so for example within your blog posts. These backlinks within the main body will receive the most link juice.
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Sidebar
These are any backlinks within the sidebar of the website, this can include your widgets for facebook or recent blog posts etc.
The navigation bar at the top of your site for example on this site ‘home, about us, the course .. etc.’
Any backlinks at the bottom of your site, below all your content.
Creating Internal Links
When creating internal links you want to ensure that they are going to pages you want to rank so for example your home page may have a main keyword of ‘best paintball markers’ but you also want to rank for the terms ‘best paintballs’ and ‘best paintball mask.’
If you wanted to allow the link juice to these pages you need to create internal (do-follow) backlinks to these pages. If these were the only two backlinks on this page then each would receive in theory 33% of the link juice (33% to the home page, 33% to best paintballs and 33% to best paintball mask).
A way to make this more efficient is to then have the best paintballs and best paintball mask pages link back to the home page. If you are creating supporting content for these terms which won’t necessarily make you money but may attract traffic and or backlinks you can again link this back to the home page which will be helping to rank your main keyword. An example of this may be how to clean your paintball marker or how to get fit for paintball, while these pages probably won’t make you money there are people looking to learn this and then you can get them to follow the rabbit hole to your homepage (possibly) as well as passing link juice to your homepage (if it is linked to).
Obviously if you are linking out to other sites this will be diluted further (but this isn’t to say you shouldn’t) so you need to think about your internal and external linking thoroughly and run audits regularly.
Internal Linking Anchor Text
When creating internal links you don’t have to worry so much about over optimization of the anchor text, when compared to getting backlinks from external sources. I have seen recommendations as high as 50% of internal anchors being your target keyword with the other 50% coming from an assortment of branded or non-specific anchors such as (brand name, naked URL, read more, click here etc.)
How to do this with your websites
With smaller sites this is rather easy to do find your main keyword then find supporting keywords. Decide which of these supporting keywords are the most important (remember to consider buyers intent). The main keyword will be your homepage the supporting keywords will be the next level down. Both of these layers form your money pages.
From here you can also look into your supporting content, which are the more informational pages which people within the niche are looking for.
Often it is easier to draw this out in layers on a piece of paper and then transfer it across to a spreadsheet before implementing it.
This is the end of this chapter, in the next chapter you are going to learn about the basics of link building. We’re going kick this off with citations and social profiles.
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