SEO first came to life somewhere around 1991 and ever since it has become increasingly important for marketers and webmasters. 

Understanding how to link your content properly is important. If you haven’t thought about how to build internal links, you are missing out on a simple ranking strategy.

Continue reading this article to learn how to spy on your competition and use their internal linking strategy to beat them in the search engines. Learn how to rank higher through the use of internal linking best practices.

Cracking the Code of Internal Links

If you aren’t building internal links on your blog, the thought of going through and figuring out how to link could be overwhelming. 

Where do you start?

What are the best practices?

Instead of having to guess, you can look at your competition (the ones who are outranking you) and see what their linking strategies are. You can start with being as good as them, and then you can level up and overtake them in the search engines.

You’re Going to Need Some Tools

If you try to re-engineer internal linking manually, it is going to take a while. Instead of spending hours trying to figure out what your competition is doing, grab a tool like Screaming Frog that will crawl the website and show you what is going on.

You can use Screaming Frog to see all of the pages on the site. When you see all of the pages on the site, you can use this tool to see what the internal links are to each URL and what the anchor is. Another thing to look for is where the keyword is placed since some people believe having it within the first 100 words of your content is important.

Another tool you’ll want to have is a backlink checker. When you use a backlink checker, you can see how strong your competition is. You’ll be able to know how important their internal links are to their SEO strategy.

Your goal is to find clues as to why the website is ranking for the term you want to rank for so your site ranking for those terms instead. If you don’t know what you’re up against, you aren’t likely to win.

Key Things to Focus On

Now that you know how important internal links are, it is time to put a strategy into place. Part of your overall strategy is cornerstone content. Cornerstone content is content that is in-depth and high value. 

When writing cornerstone content, you can focus on a more difficult keyword to rank for. Once you have this content in place, you need to think about articles you can write around that topic so you can link back to your cornerstone article.

The extra content you write is likely to be less in-depth on the overall topic but instead on a specific part of your cornerstone content. When you link to your cornerstone content, you want to use the anchor text like your competition used it so you can get the same results.

When you are interlinking, you should know that your content needs to be as good as or better than your competition’s content. If your content is low-quality, even if it outranks your competition for a little bit, it will go back down again.

Create High-Quality Content

While link building is important, your core content needs to be focused on the web visitor. If your content ranks but it doesn’t solve the challenge in the query, you aren’t going to get the results you want. Here are some key things to remember when you are creating content.

1. Focus on the Visitor’s Solution

When writing the content, instead of focusing on keywords, you need to think about how your content solves the visitor’s problem. When a reader knows your content will solve their problem, they are more likely to stay on the page.

2. Write Content that is Easy to Read

Even if your site solves the reader’s problem, they may click away if your content is hard to read. Content may be hard to read if it is written in large blocks, with complicated language or if the text is too small. Look at your website on various screen sizes and see how it looks to make sure everyone has access to your message.

3. Naturally Insert Keywords

As you’re writing your content, naturally insert keywords instead of stuffing them into the content uncomfortably. You should also write words you want to use as anchor links to your cornerstone content. 

Even if your cornerstone content is created to rank and be linked to, it also needs to link out to other content. If you are writing cornerstone content, you need to have a strategy in place about what content you want to help rank through your cornerstone blog post.

4. Draw on the Reader’s Emotions

As you are writing your content, your goal is to connect with the visitor’s emotion. The more you connect with the visitor’s emotion, the more pull you will have on them when you make your call to action.

Understanding this when you write your content can help keep people on your site longer as well. Having longer on-site time is a good signal to Google that you are a high-quality website. This is just one of the many signals search engines use to rank your site along with the links you build inside and outside of your website.

What You Should Not Do

If you see the potential of this strategy, you might be thinking about taking it to the extreme. Before you go overboard with your interlinking, you should know that abuse of this strategy is not going to pay off in the long-run. You should always use this strategy to link from relevant pages to relevant pages.

Focusing on your visitor’s user experience shouldn’t take a backseat to ranking. When your focus on your rankings solely you won’t see the best long-term results.

Build Your Website’s Authority and Trust

Now that you understand how important internal links are, it’s time to start building. Don’t forget you still need to build external links. Learn more about getting one-way text links today to get even higher rankings.