Internal Linking – A guide to increasing search visibility through internal linking

Internal linking and link juice

To understand the importance of internal linking, you first need to understand the concept of link juice. Link juice is a term used to describe how much authority a particular link transfers from page to page in the eyes of google. A link from a higher authority site increases your domain authority more and a link from a lower authority domain less. And the higher authority you have on your page as a whole and the individual subpages you build, the better your pages will be on Google.

Generally, this authority is described by two terms:

DA – Domain Authority

PA – Page Authority

The Domain Authority describes the authority of your entire domain. Page Authority again the authority of the individual subpage. If your site has a high level of domain authority, your individual pages will rank higher. But even if your domain authority is low, your page may be high on Google if your page authority is high.

Of course, in addition to these authority metrics, there are many other factors that influence your rankings, most notably the content and speed of the page itself.

You can easily check your own domain as well as the authority of the different subpages here!

Authority meters themselves are not any official metrics of Google, but are metrics created by third parties to model how Google values ​​different pages. Of course, the official authority and weight between the various variables is not disclosed by Google, as this would make it easier to manipulate Google search results.

Internal Linking Basics – Silos

Internal linking therefore aims to transfer link juice from one page to another. In its simplest form, this is to keep all relevant subpages as short of a distance away as possible from the front page, since the front page tends to collect the most links and thus the most link juice. When talking about distance we refer to amount of clicks.

There are many different methods and ways to describe or think about internal linking. There is a skyscraper model, a pillar content strategy and more.

From my own point of view, the simplest way to structure search engine optimization is “siloing” the content to describe the construction of a particular architecture on the site. In practice, this model is quite easy to demonstrate.

For example, in English, we have our blog page at: https://www.trustmary.com/blog/

The blog, on the other hand, has different categories, such as customer experience blogs here: https://www.trustmary.com/blog/category-name/

So a single blog, for example, from this url: https://www.trustmary.com/blog/category-name/blog-name

And links to these categories can be found on every subpage in the footer.

In this case, unlike online shopping in some cases, the intention is not to rank the category pages. The Category pages simply work to clarify the structure and direct the link juice. Then some speculate that such a structure would make the page easier to index for Google, and would result in better search results.

It doesn’t really matter if this model is optimal or if it just works in this context and facilitates practical implementation. Of course, time will tell if there is something in the model that needs to be corrected.

Internal linking from content to content

In addition to siloing, it is also worth linking from the content itself. Particularly useful is linking to a specific blog, with the anchor text you want that page to reach.

For example, let’s imagine that we want to increase this page: https://www.trustmary.com/ with the search term video testimonials.

In that case, we might want to link to that page as follows: video testimonials.

Yes, this is quite a simple example, and especially when going for external linking, it is worth thinking that not all links are put with such “aggressive” anchors, but use more natural anchors.

How much internal links

One commonly used for rule of thumb is that each blog should link internally to at least ten other blogs.

Personally, I try to link as much as possible between blogs, while still keeping the text natural. So linking should not become distracting.

In practice, it is often easier for me to do a lot of internal linking at once and forget about the links when I write content. So I typically have one day in my calendar every few months, so I spend a few hours putting down links between blogs.

In summary of internal linking

Understanding the basics of internal linking can greatly help improve your company’s search engine visibility. However, with internal linking, there are no miracles to be done if the content simply does not exist.

If you have a lot of content on your site and certain subpages are well on Google and your site has a high level of authority, then internal linking can do wonders.

The meaning of internal linking therefore depends on the context.