Internal Linking Opportunities: How to Quickly and Easily Find Internal Link Targets
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There’s a lot of debate in the SEO community about the importance of internal linking and whether or not it’s a ranking factor.
I recently looked at a powerful case study backing up the importance of finding internal linking opportunities on your website.
Nina Out and About saved hours of time and increased rankings by 30% by simply changing their internal linking strategy!
This guide aims to help you identify internal link opportunities using three simple methods.
Internal Link Builder Tools to Use
We use three popular tools and techniques to find internal links on our WordPress website. These methods don’t have to be complicated, and you don’t need to be an expert to do this. Let’s break it down and make it super simple for you.
Link Whisper
Link Whisper makes it easy to find internal linking opportunities in the WordPress backend.
1. Install and Activate Link Whisper
If you’ve never used the WordPress plugin before, you’ll need to find, install, and activate it. Go to “plugins” and “add new.”
Search for Link Whisper in the search bar and click “install now.” Once it’s installed, you’ll want to click “activate” to enable it.
To get the most out of your Link Whisper plugin, you’ll want to purchase a premium license key to activate your subscription.
Once you subscribe and get your activation key, you’ll download Link Whisper to your computer.
From there, you’ll want to install Link Whisper on your site using the desktop download and “add plugins” page.
The site will handle the installation; just make sure to activate the plugin when the installation is complete.
For a complete breakdown of how to install Link Whisper on your site, check out our tutorial.
2. Use the Internal Links Report
Go into your WordPress dashboard and click the Link Whisper plugin on the left, then click “links report.”
This brings up a list of all your published posts and the number of internal and external links they have. You can sort it by posts without any links to identify the pages that need optimization the most.
In this example, you can see three pages that do not have any inbound internal links. This means that any other page is not linking to these articles on the website. These are prime opportunities for internal linking, so let’s open one up.
3. Look Through Internal Link Suggestions
Link Whisper provides internal link recommendations based on the topics and language used in the article. We’re talking about storage units in this article, and dumpsters are a related topic.
As a result, the tool found instances where we discuss dumpster sizes and other storage-related sizes. This could be an opportunity to link to an article about storage units.
If the link doesn’t make sense, you can click the “edit sentence” button and change the wording to provide more context or make the sentence more relevant for your link.
4. Add The Internal Links
The final step is to check the box and add the links.
If you take a look at the example above, you can find two incredibly relevant examples of internal links in this article.
The anchor texts are related to storage units, and there are two articles about moving that these links are coming from.
Click “add links” at the top of the page to add the links and wait for the page to finalize. When you go back to the links report, that page should have moved because it doesn’t display “0” links anymore.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is another popular option for auditing and adding internal links to your website. Here’s how you’ll do it:
1. Download and Install the Tool
Go to the Screaming Frog website and download the SEO Spider tool to your computer. Install the software and follow the instructions on the page.
You can use the free version to crawl up to 500 URLs, or you can upgrade to the premium subscription. If you choose the upgrade, you’ll need to purchase a license on the website and enter it using the desktop application.
2. Launch SEO Spider
Open the tool on your computer, enter your website in the top bar, and click start.
The crawl will begin, and the tool will provide a list of URLs on your website as well as information about the health of each page.
3. Search for Internal Link Opportunities
Once the crawl is complete, you’ll want to go to “configuration,” do a “custom search,” and ask the tool to highlight specific pages that contain certain phrases.
For example, if you’re trying to find pages to internal link to an article about “moving to Texas” you might want to find every page on your site that contains that phrase or something to do with Texas.
4. Add the Links
Now that you have a list of all the relevant articles, you need to add the links to those pages. Make sure to look for anchor text that tells the reader and Google what they’ll learn if they click through.
Remember that you can verify if this process worked by finding the URL on the main page and clicking “inlinks” at the bottom.
“Site:” Search
A “site:” search is a simple way to find internal link opportunities without purchasing internal link builders or tools.
Instead, you’re using the information Google already provides in the search engine. Here’s how you do it:
1. Perform the Search in Google
Open your web browser and go to Google.com. Type “site:yourwebsite.com” in the search bar. Replace “yourwebsite.com” with your website name.
Then, add a space after the “.com” and type in a relevant keyword or topic you want to find internal link opportunities about.
For example, if we wanted to find other articles on our website about “internal links” we could search “site:linkwhisper.com internal links.”
Here are some examples of other pages we could use to link to this one.
2. Review the Search Results and Add Links
Just because the search brings up a bunch of examples doesn’t always mean they have contextual relevance. You want to make sure to manually review each example so you can find relevant anchor text in the article to link to your new post.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to go into the backend of whatever you used to build your site and manually add the internal links to the anchor text.
Why are Internal Links Important to Google?
Internal links are important for your SEO strategy because they help both Google and users navigate your site more effectively. When you have internal links that link between related pages, it helps Google’s crawlers move throughout the site and discover all your pages.
When you link from one page to another, it connects the pages to help Google find keywords and other related information it might have missed.
Internal links are also important for user experience. You can’t always cover a topic entirely on one page. As a result, providing internal links makes it easier for the user to get all the information they need on your site without having to click away.
This means you can keep users on your site longer, which looks good from Google’s standpoint.
How to Set Up an Internal Link Strategy
It’s important to know how to find internal links in a website, but we want to take things a step further. Having an internal link structure is just as important.
Think of it this way. Every article on your website has an “overall theme” or topic. That theme is relevant to other topics, and that helps tie the articles together.
For example, an article about bananas is relevant to articles about fruit but can also be relevant to articles about bread and baking.
The article about bananas is not relevant to an article about basement hydroponics – even though these two topics could still be on the same website.
You need to make sure you’re internal linking in only the most sensible and relevant ways possible. These three tips will help you.
1. Determine Your Site’s Structure
There are several different ways to organize your content, including silos, clusters, and topic-based structures. Whichever structure you choose, make sure it is logical and intuitive for users to follow.
2. Create a Hierarchy of Pages
Your homepage is at the top of your hierarchy, followed by category pages, then individual blog posts and product pages.
If we use this fishing website as an example – anglers.com is the homepage, fish finders is a category page, then you have each individual type of fish finder from there.
Having this type of structure makes it easy for Google to crawl your website, and it improves the experience for your users.
It also makes it easy to find internal linking opportunities and create a nice web of pages that are all interconnected.
Adding navigation links to your pages is a nice way to throw relevant internal links in without having to work them into the text.
Navigation links can be included in your header, footer, or sidebar and should be easy to find and use. These links help users quickly navigate to different parts of your site and can also help search engines understand the relationship between pages.
Final Thoughts
Finding internal linking opportunities doesn’t have to be complicated. Using the three methods outlined in this guide should make optimizing your website for internal links simple and fast. Do this consistently as a part of your publishing process.
We highly recommend using Link Whisper for internal linking because it’s the only option here that automatically finds and adds internal links.
Learn more about Link Whisper today!