17 Best Internal Linking Tools To Enhance Your SEO
You publish a great blog post that covers a topic your readers care about. But instead of getting traffic and helping your SEO, it vanishes into the depths of Google's search results. What went wrong? While internal linking tools won't solve all your SEO problems, they can help. Internal linking tools help you find and create internal links for your content.
They can drastically speed up the process of optimizing your posts for SEO so you can boost your traffic and your rankings. This guide explores the significance of internal links for SEO and how internal linking tools can help you improve your website's performance.
Journalist AI is an AI SEO writer that automatically publishes content to your blog. With Journalist AI's content-writing features, automations, and integrations, it makes it easy for businesses to generate and publish SEO-optimized blog posts that improve your website’s internal linking structure.
What Do You Mean By Internal Linking?
Internal links are hyperlinks that point to other pages within the same website. Also called “site links,” internal links help users and search engines navigate your website. Users who click an internal link are taken to another page on your site. This allows them to find the content they’re looking for.
When you click an internal link, search engines follow the link to discover the page and read its content. If no one links to a page on your website, it can be challenging for users and search engines to find. Internal links can help boost your SEO, as they help spread link equity (or authority) around your site.
Check out this comprehensive video tutorial on utilizing internal linking tools:
What Does Internal Linking Do For SEO?
Internal links are essential in how search engines like Google rank your website. The more internal links you have pointing to a page, the better. This is because internal links help establish a hierarchy on your website. They help search engines understand your website structure and pinpoint the most important pages.
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Which Is The Best Way For Internal Linking? 10 Best Practices
1. Utilizing Journalist AI for Internal Linking
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2. Relevance Is Key: Link to Related Content
Relevance is key in SEO; it's one of the main ranking factors. Search engines aim to show users content that is relevant to them. Engines use a few signals to assess the relevance of a page, one of them being internal links. By linking to related and complementary content, you signal to search engines that your website offers a comprehensive and interconnected resource on a specific topic.
In other words, you position yourself as an expert in the field. This is known as building topical authority through topic clusters. You can create different topic clusters on your site, from content libraries and directories to the hub and spoke model and databases. The gist is that you group internal pages or articles around a specific topic. By interlinking these pages, you create a web of related content.
3. Add Value With Your Internal Links
One crucial tip to remember is that you shouldn’t add internal links just for the sake of it. Only use internal links that add value to the user. SEO guru Steve Toth makes an excellent case for this in his article “Links, au natural.” Use links that fit naturally with the context of the sentence and are valuable to people interested in the subject. These links add value to the user and invite them to explore more as they relate to what they were initially interested in.
4. Use Descriptive Anchor Text for Internal Links
The way to encourage clicks on your internal links is to give the user an indication of what lies beyond the link. This is where the art of mastering anchor texts comes in. Google recommends you use descriptive anchor text so that users and search engines can understand the context of the page you’re linking to. Avoid linking to phrases such as “click here” or “read more.” These aren't optimal anchor text examples. But keep in mind that while your anchor text should be descriptive, it must still be concise.
5. Vary Your Anchor Text
When linking to a pillar page from different pages, it’s important to vary anchor text and not always link to the exact phrase. This will not only help search engines understand the context of a page’s content, but it will also sound more natural. You can do this by using synonyms and variations of your keyword.
6. Place Important Links at the Top of Your Pages
It’s common practice to place your most important content at the top of your pages. That’s because that’s where they will be most visible. When visitors land on your page, they usually scan the content from top to bottom. Placing the most important links at the top makes it easier for them to find and access critical information or navigate to essential pages quickly.
7. Link From High Authority Pages to Lower Authority Pages
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, one of the benefits of internal links is that they pass on link equity. So, if your site has a high authority page that attracts many backlinks and ranks high on SERP, you can leverage its authority to boost the visibility of other related pages. You can do so by including internal links within that page that direct users and search engine crawlers to the other pages that you consider essential. Nevertheless, remember to only link to relevant pages and not fall into link stuffing when applying this tip.
8. Link From Your Homepage
The homepage is usually the most critical page of a website. So, if a user lands on your homepage, internal links can help you guide them to other important pages on your site. You shouldn’t solely rely on your navigation menu for that. Google recommends that your most essential pages be clickable from your homepage - it’s not common for search bots to crawl pulldown menus. This also makes it easier for users to explore those pages they may not have known existed. It’s also an excellent way for you to show all my offerings and increase the chances of converting users to customers.
9. Keep Your Links Sounding Natural
Anchor text is a great place to add relevant keywords to your page. However, you shouldn’t overdo this at the expense of sounding spammy. Remember that keyword stuffing violates Google’s spam policies. So, that will hurt your SEO efforts. Instead, try to write naturally and only include internal links and keywords when they are relevant. Also, don’t add too many links next to each other - that does not make for a natural reading experience. Google recommends you space out the links with context.
10. Avoid Link Stuffing
Similar to keyword stuffing, link stuffing is also seen as spammy. John Mueller of Google addressed this issue during one of the Google SEO office hours. When asked, “Does that mean that having a lot of internal links on a page could do more harm than good?” Mueller replied: “We use the internal links to understand the structure of a page better. If all the pages are linked to all the other pages on the website, then there’s no natural structure there.
It’s like one giant mass of pages for this website; they’re all interlinked, and we can’t determine the most important one. We can’t figure out which ones of these are related to each other. That makes it harder for search engines to understand the context of the individual pages within your website.” He added: “Yes, if you dilute the value of your site structure by having so many internal links that we don’t see a structure anymore, then that makes it harder for us to understand what you think is important for your website."
According to Mueller, internal links give you some control over how you want your pages to be shown in search results. “If you tell search engines pretty clearly and directly, well, this is my primary page, and from there you link to different categories, and the categories link to different products, then it’s a lot easier for us to understand that if someone is looking for this category of product, this is that page that we should be showing in the search results. If everything is cross-linked, then it’s like, well, any of these pages could be relevant.
And then maybe we’ll send the user to some random product instead of your category page when you’re looking for a category of products.” So, how many internal links should you add to one page? Mueller did not recommend the exact number of internal links you should add to a page. There is no magic. However, you can rely on common sense to determine a reasonable number of internal links per page. Do that by thinking about adding relevant links, providing value, and enhancing the user experience. More links is not always better.
Update Existing Links
You should periodically do an internal link audit to ensure all your links are valid. In content marketing, it’s common to change your website’s content. For instance, you may combine multiple low-performing posts into one long-form article. Sometimes, you may find that a page has been permanently removed or its URL has been changed significantly.
Broken internal links that lead to 404 error messages negatively impact your SEO score. In this case, consider implementing redirects to guide users who access outdated links to the most relevant and up-to-date content. A 301 redirect will also help you preserve the link equity of the old page and pass it to the new page. John Mueller of Google has also recommended fixing internal links on a Reddit comment.
17 Best Internal Linking Tools To Enhance Your SEO
1. Journalist AI: An Automated Internal Linking Content Creator
Journalist AI is an AI-powered SEO writer that automatically publishes content to your blog. With Journalist AI's content-writing features, automations, and integrations, it makes it easy for businesses to generate and publish SEO-optimized blog posts that improve your website’s internal linking structure.
For example, creating content with Journalist AI automatically generates internal links to existing relevant pages on your website. This helps you make more comprehensive content for your users and improve your website’s SEO. Sign up today to get three free articles from our AI article writer.
2. AIOSEO: The All-in-One SEO Plugin With an Internal Linking Assistant
AIOSEO is an all-in-one SEO plugin for WordPress. It has a built-in link assistant that helps you improve your internal linking strategy. The link assistant works by analyzing your content and suggesting relevant internal links. This allows your posts to get more exposure by connecting them so search engines can crawl them easily. AIOSEO’s internal linking assistant helps you identify orphaned posts and improve your content management efficiency.
3. Link Whisper: A WordPress Plugin for Smart Internal Linking
Link Whisper is an internal linking tool that uses artificial intelligence to suggest relevant internal links as you write in the WordPress editor. The plugin crawls your entire website to identify pages that don’t have any inbound internal links and recommends opportunities to add them. With the auto-linking feature, you can build links from keywords — so all past and future instances of a given keyword will link to your chosen page.
4. Google Search Console: An Internal Linking SEO Tool Straight From Google
Google Search Console is a free tool for anyone diving deep into internal linking SEO. It shows you exactly how your site’s internal links work. Plus, it’s free. GSC pinpoints broken links, highlights link opportunities, tracks page performance, and finds orphaned pages.
5. Yoast SEO: A Comprehensive SEO Plugin for WordPress
Yoast SEO is a comprehensive SEO plugin for WordPress and Shopify websites. Its linking tool helps structure your site by suggesting internal links for related content. Suggestions appear in the text editor as soon as you start typing, or you can drag and drop relevant links without leaving the editor. The tool also shows you how many internal links are pointing to a post and how many I have in it — this reduces the chances of creating orphan pages (pages with no internal links).
6. WILO: A WordPress Plugin Focused on Internal Linking Opportunities
WILO is another WordPress plugin, but this one focuses solely on internal linking opportunities. It finds existing content to link to every time you publish new content. An analysis feature also highlights the health of your internal linking strategy by giving each page a score. This gives you an overview of where you can improve your efforts and whether anchor text duplicates are bringing your score down (and where they are).
7. Internal Link Juicer: A Simplified Internal Linking Tool
Internal Link Juicer is an internal linking tool that simplifies it all. It links keywords across your posts automatically. Why you'll love it: Automated linking: Creates links based on keywords. Efficient: Saves time by cutting manual linking tasks. Customizable: Plenty of options to match your linking strategy.
8. Ahrefs: An SEO Tool With Strong Internal Linking Features
Ahrefs is about helping sites rank higher, so it’s no surprise that Ahrefs features an internal linking tool. The tool creates an internal linking report that identifies the top 10 trafficked keywords for each crawled page and looks for mentions of those keywords on your other pages. You can also filter results by domain rating to see which pages are your most authoritative. Any pages you link to from these high-ranking pages will enjoy a boost in link juice.
9. The Internal Link Manager: An Internal Linking Tool That Gets Straight to the Point
There is nothing fancy about this internal linking tool. But that's not a bad thing. The Internal Links Manager plugin for WordPress automates internal link building across your site. It lets you link keywords to any URL within your site. And it's free! Why you'll love it: Easy to use: Just create your keywords and add links. Automatic internal linking: Simplifies linking keywords to related content. SEO improvements: Boosts site structure for search engines.
10. LinkStorm: A Dedicated Internal Linking Tool
LinkStorm is a dedicated internal linking tool that analyzes your linking strategy and identifies opportunities. It works by crawling every page on your site to understand the content and then suggests relevant links between related pages or pages that target similar keyword clusters. The tool also highlights broken links, orphan pages, and poor anchor text so you can fix those problems.
11. YARP: A Unique Internal Linking Tool for WordPress
YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) is one of the more unique internal linking tools for WordPress. It helps improve your website's internal linking and engagement. But how? Well, It auto-suggests related content at the end of each post. Giving readers an extra nudge to explore more of your site! Why you'll love it: Easy to Use: Quick to set up and add to your WordPress site. Boosts engagement: Give users the best-related content. And cut bounce rates by keeping them on your site longer! Improves SEO: Getting more juice to your site's internal linking structure.
12. Internal Linking: An Internal Linking Tool With GSC Integration
Internal Linking connects to GSC to reveal which queries each page on your site ranks for. It’ll then suggest internal linking opportunities for these queries based on the keywords on the page. Through detailed reports, you can get a list of target URLs and the paragraphs that include the GSC queries and indicate whether there are already internal links between the pages (you can hide the already linked pages so you only see new linking opportunities).
13. SiteSeer: An Internal Linking Audit Tool
SiteSeer’s internal link audit feature helps you identify internal linking opportunities, showing you where you can make the quickest and most effective improvements. The tool crawls your site to record and assess the effectiveness of your internal links, giving URLs a score based on several criteria, including the number of links to each URL, anchor text variety, and link placement. It can also highlight orphaned pages and generic and empty anchors so you can optimize these for quick wins.
14. Screaming Frog's SEO Spider: A Website Crawler for Internal Linking Analysis
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool helps brands improve their internal linking strategy by identifying broken links and missed opportunities. When you import your sitemap, the tool generates a list of every page on your website, which you can filter via page or select multiple pages simultaneously. You can see all links in the crawl or drill down further to only show links with specific anchor text. This will show you what anchor text links to what page so you can see any gaps in your strategy. You can also view link positions or where internal links are positioned within pages.
15. Frase: A Content Optimization Tool With Internal Linking Features
Frase’s internal and external links tool uses GSC data to show you which internal links are pointing to what pages on your site. You can integrate data from multiple domains and search for internal links by keyword or phrase. For example, if you want to find all internal links relating to SEO strategy, you can
16. WebSEO: An SEO Tool With Internal Link Analysis Features
WebSEO is a 23-tool robust SEO platform, but its Internal Link Analysis tool is handy for creating and maintaining an effective internal linking strategy. It also shows you what anchor text is used for each internal link, allowing you to review your entire link portfolio in one place to ensure that every link has relevant anchor text to the target page.
17. SEOClarity: An Internal Link Analysis Tool for SEO Performance Improvement
SEOClarity’s Internal Link Analysis tool reviews data on every site page to inform your internal linking strategy. Get an authority score for each page, and see your internal linking structure at a glance. In addition to finding broken links and orphan pages, the tool uses an advanced algorithm to predict the value of new links.
What Is The Difference Between Internal Link and Backlink?
Internal Links: The Roadmap for SEO Success
Internal linking is a pure SEO strategy in which you build a proper internal linking structure for your website. The general recommendation is to build your website so visitors can access any part with no more than three clicks.
You should include the main keyword (short-tail or long-tail keyword) of the targeted page on your website in the internal link text. This allows robots to follow the specific link and pass part of the authority to the specified page. This strategy helps visitors easily navigate through your website and find information quickly. It also helps search engine robots better understand your website and the directions where they have to go for more information.
Ensuring Target Pages and Proper Linking
When building an internal link strategy, ensure that target pages exist and are linked correctly. Both visitors and search engine robots do not like broken links. If there are broken links, visitors will leave your website (just as they do when searching third-party websites).
Moreover, search engines will understand that your website is not monitored and maintained correctly. They will likely move your pages and website to a lower position in the SERPs, favoring better-developed and error-free websites.
While Google specifies that keywords are no longer that important on your pages, all other websites still rely on the keywords and their usage, and you don’t want to lose this huge audience that all Google competitors can bring you.
Backlinks as a Ranking Factor
Backlinks have become a ranking factor in Google and other search engines. The main logic of building backlinks is to acquire as many as possible from reputable sources, preferably from high-authority websites within your industry, as well as from different media, PR websites, local directories, and similar sources. Backlinks should be highly authoritative and reputable; otherwise, they can damage your reputation, affect your SERP rankings, and lower your visitor base, potentially harming your online business.
Consequences of Poisonous Backlinks
Search engines may penalize you for unethical marketing techniques if your website accumulates many poisonous backlinks from low-quality sources. Natural backlinks from relevant and authoritative sources are considered beneficial.
There are 14 basic backlink technologies, including editorial backlinks, guest blogging, business profile backlinks, backlinks from webinars, free-tool backlinks, acknowledgment backlinks, guest posts, badge backlinks, PR backlinks, comment backlinks, paid links, directory links, and forum backlinks. The last two techniques are often deemed low-quality. However, any unethical backlink strategy can lead to poor results and harm your website more than it helps.
Acceptable Paid Link Strategies
The only acceptable paid link strategy is purchasing links in search engine media and public press. Other paid links are considered spam and likely result in penalties from search engine algorithms. High-quality backlinks from prominent companies signal to search engines that your website is trustworthy, which can improve your SERP rankings. Additionally, referral traffic from high-quality backlinks can directly contribute to revenue growth.
Competitor Analysis and Backlink Strategy
Analyzing the backlink strategies of leading competitors and prominent companies reveals that they focus on continuously growing high-quality backlinks from reputable sources, often achieved organically as their websites gain more credibility. Conversely, prospective companies may lose visitors, authority, and SERP positions due to poor backlink strategies and spam techniques that result in harmful backlinks. Internal links and backlinks should be managed separately; internal linking is an SEO technique, while backlinks are a digital marketing strategy.
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Journalist AI is the AI SEO writer who auto-publishes your blog. With Journalist's AI writing, Google indexing, content syndication, "SEO-optimized" writing, content publishing features, and many automations that save you time, Journalist makes it as easy as possible for companies to write high-quality content at scale. Journalist is the best B2B AI writing tool. Sign up today to get 3 free articles from our AI article writer.
7 Incredible Benefits Of Internal Linking
1. Internal Linking Makes It Easier for Users to Navigate Your Site
A connected network of articles allows the reader to freely navigate the page in search of the information he is looking for. Intuitive menus, properly structured categories, and similar entries displayed on the blog make the user friends with the site and spend more time on it.
2. Internal Linking Helps Google Identify the Subject of the Page
With linking, Google indexes pages much better and increases the site's visibility for keywords. Links allow you to combine different content, from blog posts to product categories or product pages themselves, and thus give the search engine free access to all content. This is especially important with large online stores.
3. Internal Links Increase the Time Spent on the Site
Intuitive and related thematic links make users more eager to browse the site. The time of interaction with the site increases. Thanks to this, Google begins considering the site valuable to users, improving its position in free search results.
4. Internal Linking Reduces the Bounce Rate
Internal linking encourages you to browse the site more deeply and jump between subpages. This significantly reduces the number of people who leave the site without performing any action. Bounce rate is information in Google Analytics that shows us the percentage of people who have viewed only one page on a website.
5. Internal Linking Support the Sales Process
Another benefit associated with the skillful placement of internal references is the “deliberate” targeting of subsequent sales funnel levels. You are the one who guides the user through the entire purchase path, ultimately leading them to the place where they can decide to buy your products or services.
Example
by creating a blog post about different ways to heat your home, you can redirect the user to another text describing the differences between specific solutions and, consequently,, a product page in your online store.
6. Internal Linking Allow You to Direct “Power” to Specific Subpages on Your Site
Each subpage has its link juice, and adequately selected links can convey value to another subpage. The number of internal links and their quality indicate for Google which subpages are the most important for us. In this way, the search engine directs traffic to those pages to which the most significant number of links leads.
7. Internal Linking Benefits SEO
Links help Google create the page's structure and determine its subject matter. In addition, they support users and make it easier for them to use the site, increasing the time they stay on the site and reducing the bounce rate. All these factors positively affect the site's ranking by Google robots and thus translate into higher positions in organic search results.
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