WordPress Internal Linking Best Practices

Posted by Emily Brookes, in Blog

In this article, we’re sharing important WordPress internal linking best practices to help you structure your internal links correctly. We will be covering how to choose the right anchor text, how to add internal links quickly and easily, and why internal linking is important.

Whether you’re a complete beginner or a seasoned WordPress user, these insights will help you optimize your internal linking strategy and boost your site’s performance.

Why Is Internal Linking Important?

Internal linking is a crucial part of optimizing your WordPress website for both search engines and users. As well as helping crawlers navigate your site and understand the hierarchy of your content, appropriately placed internal links can help users find other relevant content, keeping them on your site for longer and reducing your bounce rate.

If you’re trying to rank one of the pillar pages on your site, adding a few internal links to it from other relevant pages on your site can often give it the boost it needs.

What is Link Equity

Link equity (also known as ‘link juice’) refers to the value or authority that a link passes from one page to another.

When a page or blog post on your site links to another page within its content, it is essentially saying that the page it is linking to is valuable.

Link equity can influence how search engines rank pages in their search results. Pages with lots of high-quality, authoritative links are generally seen as more trustworthy and valuable in the eyes of search engines. They are, therefore, more likely to rank higher than pages with no, or low-quality backlinks.

In fact, backlinks from low-quality or spammy websites could actually harm your site’s SEO.

Internal linking, on the other hand, is a safe and effective way to pass link equity to other pages on your site.

Note: Only followed links pass link equity onto another page. No-follow links will not pass authority to another page, so it’s important to ensure that you aren’t ‘no-following’ your own internal links.

Choosing the Right Anchor Text

‘Anchor text’ is the clickable text that is used as a hyperlink to link to another page or website.

Choosing the right anchor text is important from both a user’s and a search engine’s perspective.

Here are a few tips on how to choose the right anchor text for your internal links.

1. Choose descriptive and relevant keywords. The words of the anchor text should give users and search engines an idea of the content it leads to. This helps both users and search engines understand the context of the link.
2. Avoid using generic or vague anchor text. For example, “Click here” or “read more.” While this might make sense to a user browsing the site, it makes it a lot harder for search engine crawlers to understand the context of the link.
3. Don’t over-optimize anchor text. Too many exact-match keywords can be seen as spammy. Instead, focus on using natural language that provides value and context to the user as well as the bots.
4. Always link to relevant content. For example, if you are writing an article about bathroom renovations, it would be useful to link to an article about choosing the right flooring for a bathroom.

Internal Links vs. Backlinks: What’s the Difference?

While internal links and backlinks are both types of hyperlinks, they aren’t the same thing.

Internal links direct users to other content on the same website or domain. They can be used to create a hierarchy between the different posts and pages on a website and improve user experience.

On the other hand, Backlinks (also known as external backlinks or inbound links) are links from one website to another.

Both are important for SEO, but you don’t have as much control over the backlinks to your site, whereas internal linking is entirely in your hands.

How to Add an Internal Link in WordPress

So now that you understand the importance of internal links, it’s time to learn how to add internal links in WordPress.

Build Internal Links Using Link Whisper

The quickest way to add internal links to your site is by using Link Whisper. This is particularly useful if you have a lot of content already on your site, as you can add internal links to older content in just a few seconds.

The first thing you will need to do is install Link Whisper. Once you have got Link Whisper installed, you can head to the reports page and view the Links Report.

Here you will find a full report of all the links on your site. It will show you the number of inbound internal links, outbound internal links, and outbound external links on each post and page of your site.

If you click on ‘Inbound Internal Links,’ it will bring the posts with zero internal links to the top, so you can start adding links to them.

To add an inbound internal link, simply click ‘Add’ and Link Whisper will take you to a new page showing you a range of suggested pages and posts along with relevant suggested phrases that you can use for your anchor text.

Here, you can check the boxes of the posts you want to create links in, and add the new internal links to your post in seconds.

Finding Orphan Pages and Dead End Pages using Link Whisper

An Orphan Page is a blog post or page on your site with no internal links leading to it. Similarly, a dead-end page is a page on your site that doesn’t link to any other pages on your site, therefore effectively creating a ‘dead end’.

Neither is good for SEO.

The good news is, that you can easily find both orphan and dead-end pages using Link Whisper.

Use the Link Whisper Links Report to filter and sort through your posts to find these.

First, select either ‘Posts’ or ‘Pages’, and then click on ‘Outbound Internal Links’ to bring your posts or pages with no outbound internal links to the top. These are your dead-end pages.

And to find your Orphan Pages, click ‘Inbound Internal Links’ to bring the pages with no internal links to the top.

Follow the same process as above to add links from your dead-end pages to other relevant content on your site.

Adding Links as You Write

Another option is to add links manually as you write your content.

While writing, If you mention a topic that you have already written another post about, you can simply highlight your desired anchor text and click the “link” icon in the toolbar.

You will see a small pop-up above your text. Here, you can either paste in the URL of the page you want to link to, or start typing, and WordPress will automatically suggest internal pages that you can link to.

Once you’ve chosen a page to link to, click “Add Link”.

The hyperlinked text should now be underlined to indicate that it’s a link.

Remember to save your changes or click on “Update” if you are editing an older page or blog post that has already been published.

Conclusion

Internal linking is a key part of WordPress SEO, so it shouldn’t be overlooked. Adding internal links is easy to do, and can give your pages the boost they need to rank, so it’s an easy win.

If going back through hundreds of older blog posts to add internal links sounds daunting, don’t worry, because using Link Whisper can save you hours of time and ensure that your internal linking strategy is solid going forward.