The use of internal links is an important part of effective search engine optimization. Interestingly, you can use internal links in two different ways in relation to SEO content writing.
But as you will see in this article, as internal links have no direct impact on the writer of the article, they are often left out by the writers.
Two Types Of Internal Links
Internal links are just that, links that point internally, that is to another page or article on the same website. However, from an SEO writing point of view, they have two very different types.
- Internal links that point to the article that’s been written. From other articles, menus, footers, sidebars etc.
- Internal links in the actual article, pointing to other content on the same website.
Why SEO Copywriters Tend To Forget About Internal Links
As you can see, none of the two uses of internal links have direct relation to the writer of an article.
Type 1 of internal links would mean inserting links into other content on the same website, pointing to the new article. As this usually requires an editor’s job, most SEO copywriters don’t even think about that or they have no authority to touch other content on the website. You would never hear an SEO content writer ask for inserting links into older articles pointing to their new article.
Type 2 of internal links would actually benefit the article you are linking to and not the one that’s providing the actual link. And even if SEO most copywriting assistant software would advise you to use them, unfortunately most SEO content is written in Word or Google docs, independently from the website. Most SEO writers don’t even know the whole content of the website (often times they don’t even know what website they are writing for), leaving no chance for proper internal links being inserted into the copy.
The most important advise I can give you, related to using internal links in SEO copywriting, is to have someone who is familiar with all content on the website, and let them insert as many internal links to new articles, or even old ones for that matter, as they can.
How To Use Internal Links In SEO Copywriting
Here are some tips that you can apply to your SEO content to have better rankings in general:
- Point to the new article, strategically. This is more of an editor’s job than that of a copywriter, but you should take internal links seriously. If a new content is intended to rank for a more difficult keyword, make sure to link to it from as many places in your website as possible.
- Update old content to link to newly published content. Make sure that whenever a new article is published, link to it from old content that can be related to it.
- Link to all possible resources on the website from your article. This is the same thing but in the other direction. It’s best if you have someone who knows all your content, ideally a good SEO copywriter is pretty familiar with the website. Go through the newly written content and if you find that any old content is related to one part of your new article, insert an internal link pointing to the old content.
- Yes, you can link to any type of content. When using internal links in your copy, you shouldn’t just link to other articles. You can link to your homepage, archive pages, product pages etc.
- Don’t overuse this technique. You don’t need to use internal links in every single article just because some assistant software or SEO guru tells you to do it. Link to another piece of content only if it is related to the actual sentence. Use internal links so that the reader can dive into a topic more deeply.
- Except when not. Rules are to be broken, consider that for my last paragraph. Sometimes you can do a trick to link to basically any content on your website. If you have an important page that you want to rank for a difficult keyword, one technique can be to link to it extensively from within your website. From a writer’s point of view this means that you have to insert an additional sentence or paragraph to ‘twist’ the original topic of the article to be able to link to that desired content. Believe me, every two topics can be linked together, and that’s one of the creative beauties of SEO copywriting.
- Anchor text is your friend. I find that the importance of anchor text in search algorithms has decreased over the years, but it still has some importance. Unfortunately, you can easily ‘overoptimize’ this with regular links. But when it comes to internal links, there is no such thing that too much. You can use the exact phrase you want to rank your content for as anchor text. This technique doesn’t seem to have any negative effect, on the other hand, it can significantly improve Google’s judgement of your linked content.