Internal Links

Internal links are links that point to another page on your own site.

You can use internal links to help users navigate your site and spread link equity from page to page.

Contextual Links

One of the most common types of internal links is a contextual link.

Within your content, it can often be useful to link contextually to another page on your site. As an example, in this chapter, I might mention the importance of anchor text.

In the last sentence, you can see how I linked the phrase “anchor text” to the page about anchor text. This allows users to easily browse to that page and passes link equity to the anchor text page!

A guideline we try to follow is to find 2-5 quality internal links for every 500-1000 words in a blog post, in addition to any other navigational internal links that already sit on your landing pages.

Navigational Links

Other types of internal linking, like a navigational menu can also be useful for SEO and for users.

This allows both users to easily find the page they are looking for and gives search engines cues about which pages are the most important.

Anchor Text

When internally linking, you can use your target keywords in the anchor text of the link.

This gives search engines clues as to what the linked page is about.

Broken Internal Links

Another thing to watch out for are broken links (links that don’t work) on your page, whether internal or external. If you accumulate several of these, it can harm your SEO.

There is a WordPress plugin called Broken Link Checker you can install to monitor broken links on your site.

Make sure to regularly check this plugin in case any of your links break!