How to Do Internal Linking The Right Way | Ep. #863

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today, we're going to talk about how to do internal linking the right way. So, I can start first.

Go for it.

Yeah, so one thing is, I've seen people overuse this a lot. You got to be careful here, especially if you're using your homepage because your homepage has a lot of the equity in terms of like, you know, the— you can call it domain authority, you can call it domain rank, whatever you want to call it. These are kind of made-up metrics. But your homepage is generally very strong. How do you leverage the equity, the link equity that your homepage has? A lot of people, what they do is they put in their footers, they just put a bunch of like anchor text, rich anchor text keywords and a link to their top pages, right? To try to get them to rank higher. That does work. When I was at a company before, we got them to rank number 1 for learn web design and learn web development by just putting links in the footer. But if you overdo that, if you spam it, if you— it's very easy algorithmically to detect if you're overdoing it, you are going to get hit with a penalty. So you just got to be careful there. But if you do it the right way where you're being selective about the top pages, maybe top categories that you want to rank higher. That's how you can be smart about leveraging internal linking from your homepage. Yeah.

And when you're leveraging internal linking, another strategy that works extremely well is look at the head— the pages that are ranking for head terms. And there's all these long-tail phrases that you could be going after. Create content around those long-tail phrases, pages around it. So for example, if you have a guide to SEO, for example, Moz has a guide called the Beginner's Guide to SEO. On the intro page, they can then link to a page that talks about on-page SEO. They can link to another one that talks about link building. They can link to another one just on sitemaps, whatever it may be. But what you'll find is by using internal linking and taking links from the main page that talks about a specific topic and driving people into subpages, you'll find that those subpages will rank really fast for all terms related around those head terms or that main page that you're already ranking for.

Yeah. The example I like to look at is e-commerce websites. So if you look at zappos.com, they sell shoes among other things. And when you look at an e-commerce site, the way the site is structured, it's very smart. You got the homepage and you got core category pages such as shoes, dresses, sports shoes, whatever. And then those category pages, what happens is, and you can see in the video, I start with the homepage right here and you got these category pages. And then you have these, it might link to subcategory pages and it might link to product pages and it just goes further and further down. Basically, you got to have a logical sitemap where it's very easy for a search spider to come and crawl it, right? Because they start from the top and then they might, they're basically following your internal links. I'm like, this is a spider and it's going around and flowing throughout your website. But if you're not, especially if you're an ecommerce site and you have thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of SKUs, What happens is if you don't have a good internal linking structure, you don't have a logical structure, the search spiders can't find these other pages and they can't help you rank them, right? You got to help the search spiders help you. And in many cases, you're trying to help Google. So how can you make your sitemap make sense logically where you don't have to come back and try to fix it later? It's something that's foundational that you want to have right now instead of waiting down the road where you're wondering like, how come I'm not getting more search traffic? Because sometimes when you make those adjustments to your sitemap, I've seen traffic increases from 10% to 20%, sometimes even more than that.

And be careful. A lot of people just use rich anchor text and shove all these links in their sidebars or their footers. It doesn't work as well as interlinking throughout your content. Just adding a big block of links and being like, hey, go find my most important pages, and you're just doing this to shove in keywords and rank high. Sometimes you see a quick short-term boost, but what I've seen is it actually hurts you in the long run. Versus linking in the content. You should go back to all your old blog posts and find out if you're linking to some of your latest new ones. Every time we publish a new blog post, we go into older blog posts and interlink old related blog posts to that newer one. And it ensures that all of our blog posts are building up internal links.

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