To explain what internal linking is with a practical example, let’s suppose I have a website that talks about TV series. For each episode of a TV series I make my own article summarizing the plot of the last episode I saw.
Generally, anyone who owns a website or blog leaves each article on its own, and, at most, limits himself to inserting “Related Posts” style plugins or “Related Articles”, writing two lines like “You might be interested also ”, with a list of articles related to the article on which the user arrived.
With internal linking instead, while I write my page or my article in which I speak (continuing the example above) of the last episode of the TV series, if I refer to something that happened in an old episode, of which I have already spoken on my site, I insert a link, perhaps in brackets, for example by writing “To know more about Lucy and Peter’s wedding” and linking to the article to which I refer. This is simply internal linking (it is also possible to link the category to which the article belongs).
Why internal linking is very useful.
In my opinion there are various aspects for which internal linking is very useful in positioning, let’s see them by points:
- Let’s lower the Bounce Rate : Bounce Rate, or bounce rate, is a very important fact for search engines that rank a site based on how much time a user spends on a website. If we create articles of 300 – 600 characters in length, and don’t take advantage of internal linking, what will happen most frequently is that a user arrives on our site, reads the content that is relevant to him, and leaves.If, on the other hand, we insert other links within the article that point to interesting articles or topics, the user will probably spend more time on our website.
- We increase the number of Page Views: a consequence of the first point is clearly also the increase in pages viewed per visitor, which inevitably increases if we insert useful links in the article that lead to other pages of our site.
- We get quality Backlinks: theoretically, even if they come from our site, the links we are going to insert help the article we are linking to obtain not only popularity, but links from similar and very relevant contents, and consequently will affect the positioning.
These are the three main reasons why I advise you to work immediately on the internal linking of your website or blog, and you were already using this tool (internal linking)?
Internal linking and editorial plan
To create a good internal linking strategy it is very important to structure a good editorial plan , through which you can program the articles to be published on your site and how to link them between them, never underestimate the importance of this aspect!
Good work and good positioning.
