How to use interlinking to improve SEO and bring down bounce rate
When you are writing new blog posts and web pages or updating existing content, you should liberally use internal linking, or interlinking, as rightly pointed out by this Content Marketing Institute update.
What is internal linking?
By now I have over 1200 blog posts and web pages on my blog. It means, I may have covered a wide range of topics pertaining to content writing, copywriting and to an extent, search engine optimization and content marketing.
Nonetheless, I’m continuously writing new content on new topics. While writing on these new topics, I may bring up some older topics that I may have covered. Instead of explaining those older topics again, I can simply link to them.
For example, if I want to say something about content writing for email marketing, for more information, I can use a link to my Content writer & copywriter for email marketing web page.
Further, to share with you some more insights on how to carry out a successful email marketing campaign, I may talk about my previously published 15 ultimate content writing hacks for successful email marketing blog post.
These are hyperlinks to my own web pages and blog posts. This is called internal linking or interlinking. When your link to pieces of content from your own website, from within your own website, you are practicing internal linking.
You can interlink to your existing content in multiple ways, including
- Top navigation
- Sidebar
- Footer navigation
- From other blog posts and web pages
How do you find relevant links for interlinking?
The above CMI link suggests some good ways to find link worthy content under your own domain. You can use Google Search Console to find popular links on your website. You can also use the premium version of Yoast SEO.
There is also a plugin called Yet Another Related Posts in WordPress that embeds related posts under every new post that you publish. I have been using this plugin for quite a while.
I also use the Google search command “site:credible-content.com search term” to find relevant content.
For example, if I want to find relevant content on content writing for SEO that I have already published on my website, I will search for “site:credible-content.com SEO content writing” (without quotes) and this brings up all the blog posts and web pages I have written on the topic. Then, I can check which blog posts and web pages I want to link to.
Interlinking must be relevant. It must be used contextually otherwise it will be counter-productive as Google may consider it spam.
The benefit of interlinking is that when the Google crawler is crawling your content, it will also find the links it may not have covered yet or may not have crawled and indexed recently. It also brings down your bounce rate because your visitors click those links and check out other parts of your website.