Recently, we taught you about the importance of backlinks for SEO and how search engines use them to help prove the relevance of your information. Several weeks ago, we also talked about high bounce rates and how some work needed to be done if you weren’t accomplishing your http://sumnerdigital.wpengine.com/why-backlinks-are-important-for-seo/inbound marketing goals despite attracting more visitors. Since the number of page views and length of time spent on your site count towards your SERPS, we’re going to combine these two principles to show you how to use your blog posts to inspire click-throughs on your site.
Using your Blog Posts to Create Internal Links
Blog posts are an excellent way to prove you’re an authority in your field, attract visitors and increase your online presence but they’re also very handy at getting people to look at more of your pages and spend more time on your site. An internal link is one that points to a different page of the same domain – in this case, your blog is yourcompany.com/blog, for example, and a link to your homepage, yourcompany.com/home would be an internal link. If you look at our introductory paragraph for this post, we included two links. If you hadn’t read about backlinks or high bounce rates before, you would be inspired to click that link so you would know what we had to say about them. This is the concept behind creating internal links. It’s simple but highly effective!
Beware of Using too much of a Good Thing
Armed with the knowledge of how easy it is to create internal links can be dangerous if you overuse them. You have likely seen sites where almost every other phrase has a link attached. This is definitely overkill and can appear spammy to your visitors which will turn them away from your blog post. While there is no set formula, (even Google states “fewer than 100 links is desired“), limit yourself to one or two per paragraph and only if they add to your visitors’ experience. When it comes to the SEO advantage, while Google recommends fewer than 100 links per page, only links that point to relevant information are going to improve your ranking and of course, they keep secret how many links actually count!
Make your Keywords Count when Creating Internal Links
When possible, use your internal links as an opportunity to highlight keywords that you are working on developing for your inbound marketing campaigns. You should link over the keyword that you are focusing on in your blog post once, but link to others that are important to your business when possible. You’ll see that we created an internal link over the phrase, “inbound marketing campaigns,” in this paragraph. While that wasn’t the keyword focus for this blog post, it’s certainly one we would like to rank higher on!
Remember always that any keywords used should be used in a way that is very natural and only use internal links when they add to the user experience. If you point them towards more information that is helpful, they’ll learn they can count on your links to be valuable, and they’ll do so more often. It’s a win-win all around: improved SEO and happier visitors!