To have success with search engine optimization (SEO) of a website, you need to start with essentials. As being one of the most fundamental parts, the internal link building can be a powerful tool. With the right strategy and practices, you can easily maximize your internal link juice usage. However, many people overlook this part and miss the opportunity to exploit its potential. That’s why we’ll talk about how to smartly use what you already have.
Improve your internal link juice
If you have a large website with many pages and elements, are you using its full potential? If you are not sure, it’s time to change something. Each website with some content and links have a certain amount of what people call “juice”. But, not everyone is allocating it the right way. It’s like a pool of possibilities that wait to be put to usage. Generally speaking, you need to find out the right internal link strategy to drain that pool for your benefit. If you need help with this, Link Department can help you grow your online presence and organic rankings.
But, before we proceed, let’s explain what the “juice” and internal linking are.
Link juice
This is the term SEO experts use to explain the value each website allocate to another through hyperlinks. It’s like a number of votes your website gets from and gives to other websites. The higher the quality of links is, the more value or juice your website accumulates and allocates. In general, search engines use this value to determine if your pages are worth promoting.
Internal linking
This is the process of interconnecting the pages on your website. Simply put, each internal link connects one page of your website to another page on your website. Meanwhile, we can distinguish three purposes of internal linking:
- It helps users to navigate the website
- It defines the hierarchy of a website
- Internal linking distributes and improves your domain authority
What pages are potentially rich in juice?
The homepage is probably the most obvious pick. But, there are other pages on your website with the potential to be rich in juice. When planning your SEO strategy you should not miss these link building opportunities that can benefit your business. Here are some of the pages that can have a good optimization value:
- Articles, posts, and blogs
- Product pages
- Contact information pages
- About us and team bios pages
- News and events
- Sitemaps
- Footers
The most important thing here is to avoid spam. Some pages are more convenient than others so watch closely what you are linking and where. Also, don’t forget to link deep. This is very important when you are using internal links in your general SEO strategy. The deeper you go with linking, the more juice you will generate.
Some of the best practices for internal link juice exploitation
Knowing the basic terms and what pages are convenient and mostly interconnected, you can now explore some of the best practices in use.
You will need plenty of content
Obviously, you will need a lot of content if you plan a good internal linking strategy. And it doesn’t mean to just fill up space. By all means, it has to be the quality content with great value to users. When you acquire it, you easily start connecting pages and develop a good linking structure.
Relevancy is important
Whenever you are placing your link on a page, you have to make sure it’s relevant for the rest of the content. In other words, the content you are connecting needs to be related. Cross-linking throughout the entire website without paying attention to this will make no sense. And if will definitely not help you increase in ranking and acquisition of juice potential. Again, the point is to provide a better user experience and get something in return.
Using the anchor text
The best way is to use the anchor text for terms you want to rank for. In most cases, natural and unoptimized parts of sentences are the best option for linking anchor text. This is to ensure they don’t look artificial and spammy.
Don’t forget the new pages
Your high authority pages should link to your new pages to improve the overall ranking. This is something called the authority transfer, and it helps to properly distribute link authority. However, it can be a tremendous job on large websites to balance it out. But, there are many tools on the internet that you can use to find and distinguish these pages. They are effective in finding the best candidates for authority boosting. Also, it makes it easier for Google to discover and index those pages. This is especially important for pages that are deep in your site’s architecture.
Deep linking
As mentioned above, deep linking is quite important. Instead of pointing countless links to your homepage, try to go deeper into the structure. You should make a good interconnection for pages other than the homepage if you plan to have a good and high-quality SEO structure. The further, or the deeper, you go, the better is the value. Additionally, never forget that the convenience and user experience will probably be the main focus, if not already. Also, remember this when you try to distribute your CTA (“call to action”) links across your website.
Pay attention to the number of links
There is no valid reason to stock your page with links. Actually, it’s very bad practice and can be counted as spamming. There is no strict rule about how many links you can place. But, most experts will advise that about 5 links per 1000 words, for example, is maybe an optimal number. Also, make sure they are not all stacked in a single place. Spread them evenly throughout the page.
Placing links closer to the beginning
The goal is to increase the time users spend on your website. When they have something to check right away, it will keep them more interested. Of course, try not to overuse this and place everything on top. One or two links at the beginning are good enough. The rest can be equally distributed throughout the content.
Proper link building is quite important if you want to maximize your internal link juice usage. The better you develop the link building strategy the better the usage of juice will be. Overall, it will boost your SEO, reduce the bounce rate, improve your authority, and provide a much-needed good user experience.