Employing a good internal linking strategy not only allows  popular search engines to index and rank your blog, but also increases its usability by enticing readers to stay longer on the blog by offering them links to content that interests them. Unlike external linking, the web master has complete control over a blog’s internal linking structure, making it a crucial element in blog promotion and optimization.

What are Internal Links?

Internal links are hypertext links that reside on pages of your domain, which direct and navigate a reader from one page to another within the same website. Internal links help the user to easily jump to the information that he is searching for.

Why is internal linking important?

An internal linking strategy is planned to spread out link juice to all web pages, improve crawling and make the crucial pages of your site score high on the search engines.

Internal linking is important for your blog for several reasons:
•         Internal linking is vital to the communication structure of your web log.
•         It is responsible to distributing the link juice received from other blogs to your blog.
•         It marks which pages within your blog are more important than others
•         It gives to the command over which keywords should be targeted to promote lesser ranked pages of your blog

Simple tips to perk up your internal linking strategy

A good sitemap

A good sitemap is an effective way to increase internal links to important posts on your blog. It is always encouraged to have site maps with text links rather than images. Your anchor text should include popular keywords and phrases (derived from in-depth user behavior analysis) that direct the user to important pages of your blog.

Link within your content

To improve the internal linking structure of your blog, take a thorough look its content and mark out areas where it would be beneficial to add contextual links to other posts that you would want to promote. Link to your related blog posts at the end of your blog article. Include keywords in your anchor text that you would want the desired blog posts to rank for in the search engine. Improve the contextual value of your key phrases by fine-tuning the text that surrounds it. More so, make sure that your text looks natural.

Link stronger posts to weaker ones

Some posts on your blog will always be more popular than others, thus will receive more inbound links. Use the stronger pages to strengthen the weaker ones by directing internal links from them towards the weaker posts. Do not link all the pages on your blog to weaker posts, rather be selective and choose a few strong linkages.

Break your blog article into a series of posts

A good way to direct the reader form one post to another is to break your write-up into a series of posts, and provide internal linking from one post to another. This is a natural way of navigating traffic from one blog post to another and gaining page views.

Do not ignore the footer

Most readers, at any time while they are reading a blog post or even after they have already read it, scroll down to the footer to check for relevant information. Do not ignore the footer and use that space to provide links to other important blog posts.

Using these simple internal linking strategies can go a long way in promoting your blog and enhancing your online experience.