You can’t just add links all over the place.
When search engines visit your site and find an internal link, they examine the link’s context in two ways.
- The overall content of the page
- The paragraph around the link
These elements must be relevant; otherwise, the internal link will be wasted.
Page-to-page context.
You want to ensure that the page you are linking from and the page you are linking share some contextual relevance to gain traction from the internal link.
- For example, contextually correct linking from a page about dog food to a page about dog health would be appropriate.
- On the other hand, linking a page about dog food to a page about cat health does not make sense to search engines or visitors.
The issue is that both of the above may be relevant to your opinion, but you must simplify things for the search engine bots.
In the above examples, the page we are linking from is related to dogs, so a link to cats is irrelevant. However, if the page we are linking from were about pet health, then the link to cats would become more relevant.
This is the nature of internal linking optimisation: things can be correct and incorrect simultaneously, so you must consider your internal linking.
Paragraph to link to page context.
Correcting the page context is not the only consideration; you must also correct the text around the internal link.
You can’t just add a random link to an out-of-context paragraph, as the search engines will pick up on this.
- Frank is an expert designer who has worked on many different websites over the past 10 years. He specialises in WordPress websites and builds sites from scratch.
In the above example, linking the word “designer” to a page about brand design would be completely out of context.
However, if we linked the word designer to a page about web design, it’s contextually correct.
To make this even better, we need to rework the paragraph:
- Frank is a professional web designer who has worked on many websites over the past 10 years. He specialises in designing and building WordPress websites and builds sites from scratch.
In this example, we’ve added more context to the internal link and the paragraph.
Now, assuming this paragraph appears on a page related to professional website design, we have:
- A contextually correct page (or post) on which we have a;
- A contextually correct paragraph, and within this;
- A contextually correct anchor text that links to;
- A contextually correct page.
This demonstrates all the things you need to consider when adding one single internal link to one single page of your website.
The more you sweat the small stuff with internal links, the more they benefit your on-page SEO and your results in the SERPs.
This is one of the big advantages of using WILO to manually do your internal linking rather than having a plugin automate it: you need the control, precision and mindset to make these links work for you.
