Internal linking is a critical part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Indeed it is part of the method that Google uses to look at the quality of a website. It is therefore something that one needs to consider when building a website.

What is internal linking?

Internal linking is how each page of your site links to each of your other pages, on a WordPress site these pages maybe blog posts or pages.

This internal linking is usually achieved using menus, links form within pages, site maps and search engines.

An internal link is any link that links to your own site rather than to an external site.

Why is internal linking part of the SEO Algorithms?

We have to consider why the likes of Google have internal linking as part of their quality score or Page Rank Algorithm. The answer is clearly that they are trying to ascertain how a website performs for a human being.

A well linked, well structures website is easier to use, its content can be found quicker with fewer clicks, thus making the experience for the user a better one.

With this in mind we should be thinking about improving the internal linking structure of our sites for our users and not for Google, and as a by product of that, the quality score that Google has given our site will improve. After all, Google (and others) are only trying to provide their users with the best quality, most useful and usable sites matching a search query.

Good internal linking has another benefit for our sites, well structured linking alows the search engine spiders to navigate our sites more easily. This means that more of our content will be indexed within the search engines. Clearly a great benefit and one that will in turn bring us additional traffic.

How do we improve Internal linking?

As WordPress users we have a distinct advantage as the categorisation and menu systems within WordPress allow us to easily improve internal linking. Creating a well structures category system which is reflected in your menu is a very good method of improving your internal linking.

Blog posts should be in as many relevant categories as possible so that users and search engine spiders have a greater chance of finding that content.

This is where the Category Master plugin for WordPress can help. It allows you to setup automation rules based on keywords, when you either run the plugin or write a post with any one of those keywords in it, the plugin will automatically add that post to the category you have specified for that keyword.

You can see that this takes a great deal of the work out of the process for you. You can consider how you want to categorise your site in one session and from then on the plugin will handle adding posts to categories for you. You can of course still manually add the posts to any category you like.

The Category Master plugin is also a great bonus if you have a well established site and you are wanting to improve the internal linking, clearly going through 100′s of posts is not practical, so that plugin can be run to look back at all the posts on your site and add them to new categories you have created.

We recommend that you try and use a related posts plugin such as ‘Yet Another Related Posts Plugin‘ . This will also improve your internal linking as each post will link to a number of other posts that are on similar subjects, thus improving the navigability of your site.

You can further improve your internal linking by providing your users with a site map. This is a page that shows a ‘diagram’ of your site and how it links together. It will contain the titles of all pages/posts on your site and provide a link to each.

Following these tips will not improve your search engine rankings by themselves, however, they may improve the quality of your site in Googles view and don’t forget that it will make your site easier to navigate for your users, meaning that the content you have created will be found rather than hidden away in the back of your site.