As I have been blog hopping to drive traffic to my blog as part of the 60 Day Challenge I have noticed that some bloggers to not take advantage of internal linking their blog pages.

Internal links are links that go from one page on your blog or website  domain to a different page on the same blog or website  domain and they play an important role in helping your site advance in the search engine rankings.

We hear so much about getting good quality backlinks from high pr sites that it’s easy to overlook the importance of internal linking.

You can often get just as much “SEO value” from internal links placed on high-value pages on your own site as you can from SEO back links .

Part of your SEO strategy should always include internal linking, and understanding how the other pages of your website can contribute value toward your new page.

You just provide links to more relevant posts and readers click those links to read more content.

Done well internal linking can increase your page views and reduce bounce rate. A lower bounce rate shows the authority and usability of a blog.

That helps to build trust in the eyes of search engines.

Just take a look at Wikipedia for example.  It is one of the highest-ranked websites for a countless number of keywords, and most of that is due to the fact that they have a very extensive and complex internal linking structure.

When you study it closely it seems that for all the Wikipedia pages, they only have a few outbound links.

Here are my 5 tips for internal linking your blog for SEO

1 Link with Keywords

It’s important to use your target keywords as the anchor text for your internal links. It should all look natural though. It’s not necessary or good practice to stuff your post with numerous keywords.

Google frowns on using exact anchor text in backlinks you get from other blogs – that was a big part of their Penguin update but in case you are wondering using exact anchor text within your blog is different and much more acceptable.

Matt Cutts confirms this in this video.

With what he says in mind limit the number of links you place in the post or your reader won’t know where to go next.

As well as directing your reader to other pages on your site internal linking helps web crawlers to crawl and index all of your content by providing a convenient path to follow.

2 Use your Home Page

In most cases, the home page is the most linked-to and visited page on a website, and any outbound or internal links it has are given more value by the search engines.

You can accomplish that in various ways, such as creating a side tab of links to your most visited pages, or perhaps citing your various SEO landing pages as resources visitors can consult.

3 Organize your SEO Landing Pages

The chances are that your website has a fair amount of landing pages, and the good news is that they can be tapped for some nice internal linking.

All you need to do is simply add a section at the end of each page which says “related pages” or something of the sort, and underneath it place links to all the other landing pages.

There are some WordPress plugins that you can use for this such as Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

4 Get the Easy Links

There are plenty of unlikely places where most people forget to look for internal links, but the truth is that the less-visited pages, such as “privacy policy”, “terms of service” and “about us”, can serve as the perfect hosts for some juicy internal linking as they tend to have a higher page rank.

Not only are these pages given a higher consideration by the search engines, but typically they also do not have any links, and placing a few on your own will put you ahead of the competition.

5. Check For Broken Links

It’s very important to check for broken internal links on your blog from time to time. From an SEO perspective, it is important because it helps ensure that each page of your site is crawled and indexed by the search engines.

Search engines like websites that are fully functional and easy to navigate. If you have a lot of broken internal links it could impact your website’s ranking.

From your visitors point of view a broken link is very frustrating and annoying When they are expecting to get taken to a certain page and they get taken to an error page or page not available message.

I’ve experienced it and I’m sure you’ve experienced too. It does not create a good impression and you run the risk of breaking their trust.

You can check to see if Google web crawlers experienced any errors once you log into the Google Tools Dashboard. Some marketers say that this brings up errors that do not exist but SEOMoz says
it’s pretty good for diagnosing internal link issues.

If you prefer you can use the Online Broken Link Checker which checks both internal and extrernal links.

I checked my blog with this and found that out of  417 web pages I had a total of 140 broken links. Only 38 of these were  internal links. Now I have the job of fixing them!

An alternative is to check your links with WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin

Another thing to consider is installing a 404 redirection plugin which permanently redirects all 404’s to the main blog URL.  404 errors do not affect the way a site is crawled or indexed in search results. But it is a good idea to correct the broken links.

The broken link plugin does not check for broken links in the comments but I wrote a post about that here:  CommentLuv Link Cleaner Plugin Fixes Broken Links In A Jiffy

Do you check your blog for broken links?  Which broken link checker do you use?