Thanks for joining us for this 5-part series where we break down several on-page optimizations that you can do in a day that will improve not only where you show up in search but your chances of capturing the click through to your website.

If you didn’t catch Part 1 and 2 go to On-Page Optimizations You Can Do Today (Part 1) and start from there. In that first video I share a bit more about why on-page optimizations are super important in the digital landscape and I give you the super useful tool that we’ll be using to crawl your site and serve up everything in a simple excel or csv file.

Let’s get to it!

#4: Internal Linking

We alluded to Internal Linking in Part 3 when we suggested that by improving the scannability of your article with H2 or subheadings you ensure your user spends more time on your page (assuming you’re giving them what you promised in the title tag and meta description) and you provide more opportunities to link them to the next relevant article or page.

Moz defines internal as “links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. These types of links are useful for three reasons:

  • They allow users to navigate a website
  • They establish information hierarchy for the given website
  • They help spread link juice (ranking power) around websites

When creating an internal linking strategy you want to consider the entry of the website and where the particular user and/or buyer’s journey is starting within your website. Are they at the top of the funnel in awareness where you’ll likely need to give them more information before handing out a strong call to action to Buy or Opt-in or are they starting towards the middle or bottom where it would make most sense for you to link them directly to a product or service page?

There are plenty of plugins to help you organize your internal links. Yoast has one that makes it super easy to drag and drop, gather suggestions and find relevant links without leaving the CMS editor. I’ll leave a link to that tool in the description box below.

So, for Part 4’s challenge make sure that:

  1. You are considering your internal linking strategy; do you have one? Let’s get one.
  2. Use a tool like Yoast to get started or you can custom build something within your CMS’s css.
  3. And like with H2 tags, you may not be able to do all of this within a day but you can certainly create a workflow to add internal links into all new copy moving forward.

And that’s it, Part 4 of the 5-part series down! Stay tuned for Part 5 and the next on-page optimization in the line-up. Until next time!