It is vital for your website SEO to evaluate and improve your internal linking strategy regularly. Including the right internal links you ensure Google understands; the relevance of your pages, the relationship between your pages, and the value of your pages. You require steps to set your linking structure depending on your site and your set goals.
- Identify the real structure of your site
You can imagine your website as a pyramid. At the top should be your homepage, below it should be categories and after that, your individual posts and pages, and you may include subcategories.
- Be decisive on your most important content
You should decide what your most important content shall be. This should be the content communicating the goals of your business, it should be the best and complete. It should be the content that a visitor will find the products you offer and services you specialize in. You should add more links to it for Google to identify it as the most important page.
- Contextual links
If you have written several posts about a certain topic, you should link them to each other. This will show Google and your users their relevance. You can add links in sentences or at the end of your post. Your most important article is the cornerstone and it should add a link to all the other related posts.
- Add a related post section
There are tools and plugins that add complete related posts sections to your articles. After choosing one, test whether the posts are related.
- Add links to popular or recent posts
These sections can be created at the header or footer of your site to ensure they appear on all pages.
- Add navigational links
These are for topically-related pages and you can add them from the homepage. Do this for the most important pages.