Links

You can have internal links pointing to another page on your website, and external links pointing to external sources from your website. These both allow users to look at other relevant content within or outside of the site.

While both help to provide context, by using external links we can support and validate our claims in the article (e.g., referring to research or the source of a quote), and by using internal links, we can create further SEO value by establishing information hierarchy and spreading link equity (ranking power) for the site. 

Let’s unpack this last one. When you internally link pages on your site, you signal visitors and Google too, that these are thematically related, so by connecting them you build up an information hierarchy in the background (this one is more for Google to see). 

How does link equity come into the picture, and what is that? 

Imagine that one of your pages starts ranking well. If that page is connected to another via an internal link, the first well-performing page can pass through that ranking power to the other page, helping it perform better in search, too. 

This is why it’s a good idea to occasionally link from your informational content to your product, service, or webshop pages that are optimized for conversion, a.k.a. where you want people to buy something. Both can find a good position in Google if one of them does.

Extra tip: Publishing a new content piece on your site is never complete until you link to it from another, already live post. Also, make sure to internally link as many posts as possible, dictated by common sense, of course.

How can I quickly find other relevant pages to link to and from within my site?

Use the following Google search operator (that looks something like a formula) to find other pages related to the given topic you are writing about and to link those pages together.

site:URL “keyword”

Example ✍️

We wrote a blog post related to the topic of how creators can generate passive income and we wanted to find other relevant content pieces on The Creators’ Diary for internal linking purposes. This is what we typed into the Google search box: 

site:thecreatorsdiary.com “passive income”

Note 🗒️

There is no space after “site:” but you can add a space after the URL. The keyword, “passive income” is in quotation marks because I want to find pages where this exact phrase is present. If I didn’t use quotation marks, Google would list pages where both the word “passive” and “income” were used, but not necessarily “passive income”. 

Once I manually look at the listed content pieces as well, I decide which ones to internally link with my newest. By the way, if you do a simple Google search like this, putting a keyword in quotation marks (without the rest of that formula), the principle stays and the listed pages will all have the exact phrase in their content. 

Keyword-optimized links

As the last subtopic in the links section, let’s discuss anchor text. Anchor text is made of of the words that get highlighted when you put a link behind them. These are important from an SEO point of view because you can put your keywords in there, as a further step of optimizing your content. 

These are the different types of anchor text:

  • Exact match: the anchor text is exactly the keyword that the given page is optimized for (the one you are linking to)  
  • Brand: the anchor text is the name of a brand
  • Generic: “click here”, “read more”-type of text“
  • Naked URL: it’s just the plain URL 

What’s the main message here?

When you link to a page, check what keyword you optimized it for and use that keyword in the anchor text of the link when embedding it.

Exact match and the brand anchor text are what you should use, and try to use as few of the generic-type ones as possible, and completely ignore the naked URLs. 

When it comes to the exact match anchor text, it’s also good to know that, with time, as you link multiple times to the same page, you should try to use variations of the same keyword that the page is optimized for.

An exact match is great, but Google notices when something is unnatural and overdoing the keyword optimization of your links this way would definitely belong in that category (and can result in a penalty). This is true for both internal and external links.

Example ✍️

Here’s an example of an exact match anchor text for a URL in blue that navigates readers to a page we optimized for “passive income for artists” on The Creators’ Diary:

Screenshot of an internal link that uses “exact match”-type of anchor text on The Creators’ Diary — Image source: Screenshot taken by TC’D team