More About Internal Links In Your Website: Improving Contextual Linking Is An Excellent SEO Strategy

• Why Keyword Focused Internal HTML Links In Your Website Are So Important •
• You Might See Your Rankings Bump Up A Notch Or Two! •

You may be aware of the need to have links pointing to your site from other niche-related sites. These types of links are called in-pointing links. They are of value not only in helping you gain new visitors to your site, but also to show the search engines that other sites find your site worthy of linking to.

The more quality in-pointing links you have from related sites, NOT spammy sites, the better. In-pointing links are taken into consideration and affect your organic ranking positions.

However, are you aware of the importance and ranking value internal links (also referred to as contextual internal links) can provide?

What Is Anchor Text and What’s It Got To Do With Internal Links?

Anchor text is the text you use for the internal hyperlinks that link one page within your site to another. It is also very important to use the keyword phrase in the anchor text that is used in the page you are linking to.  (Please don’t use the words “click here”.)  ALWAYS try to use your keyword phrase in the internal link.  Maybe you only need to use the phrase, or maybe you need to add a few more words to make more sense in what you are saying … no matter.  Just utilize the keyword phrase found in the page you LINK TO.  

Keep in mind that you ONLY want to link one page to another page or pages, if it makes sense to do so!  Put your visitor’s experience first and foremost. Inserting internal links haphazardly all over your site not only will do nothing for your organic search engine ranking positions, it will greatly irritate your visitors as well!

OK … here’s an example of a great use of an internal link, and it makes sense for me to use it in this post. I previously wrote about HTML Linking: How To Hyperlink Pages Within Your Website. I gave a great overview of how-tos of internal linking. I am adding a few more thoughts about that post in this post.

So that you know, the keyword phrase I targeted for that post was ”HTML linking”.  Thusly, I’ve made the decision to provide the post’s Title for the internal hyperlink. (I could have made a hyperlink using just a few words.)  Not only does it contain the keyword phrase, but it also gives you, the reader, an idea of what you will be reading in the hyperlinked post.

So, what do you think of this real time internal linking example I’ve just provided? It is 100% relevant to this post, and it makes a lot of sense for me to provide a hyperlink to that post. It’s good for my search engine rankings and it is very helpful for my visitors.

I encourage you to take a good look at how you might be able to improve the internal linking structure of your website or blog. I’ll bet you’ll find more than a few opportunities to add some new keyword focused internal links. (I am assuming you have a content rich site that makes it very easy for you to link amongst your many pages of content.)

It’s not unusual for those well needed tweaks you’ll be doing to help bump up the organic rankings for the pages involved. I like doing whatever I can to help myself fare better in organic rankings. And something like improving the internal linking structure is easy and not difficult to do!

Also, another added benefit to improving your internal linking structure can be that you just might see an improvement in your visitor traffic and even sales. Whether you do want to try and improve your search engines rankings and/or you’re tweaking your site for a better user experience, attention to improving contextual internal links will never be time wasted.