You may have read other articles telling you that the earlier you can improve your website’s architecture, the better and faster results you’re going to see with internal link building.
The reason this is so important, is simply because internal links lay the foundation for your site. You need good habits from the start to lay the foundations for your future, otherwise you won’t improve your site.
If you don’t have a good website architecture and correct internal links in place, then chances are you’re not going to see good results with SEO.
All of the other hard work you do with your content, keyword research, and onsite optimization will not help that much if you don’t have an internal link building structure in place to help grow your site.
This article will identify a three-step blueprint for internal link building that will help boost your rankings with SEO. This is the exact same strategy that I’ve used to grow my site from zero to over 116,000 visitors in less than 12 months.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Download WordPress
The first step is to download and install a WordPress program to add related posts to your site. This will automatically add links all across your site so that you can have at least three internal links on every single page on your website.
In addition, for every single article on your site, you can choose three related posts to add to the bottom of the page.
While this is only the first stage of the blueprint, it’s definitely a quick win. With just 20% of the work, you will instantly get 80% of the results. It only takes a couple of minutes to download and install the plugin. Before you know it, you will have internal links to more pages on your site.
All in all, what this program does is help kickstart your internal link building and improve your website’s architecture as soon as possible. This isn’t always the perfect method to use, so that is why we have two other steps in this blueprint.
Step 2: Install Link Whisper
The next step is a plugin called Link Whisper. This is a very powerful tool that you can use to quickly figure out which pages need more internal links, where all of your internal links are, and how you can filter the link juice in your most important links.
Link Whisper gives a comparison of all the internal and external links coming into your page. Also, you can check the internal links on your page to get a breakdown of which pages you have on your website and when they were published.
In addition, the number of inbound and outbound internal links and outbound external links can also be checked, so you know which ones need improvement.
The plugin also allows you to do auto link building. You can also automatically link keywords to certain pages.
If you have some pages on your site with no internal links, these are known as orphaned pages. There is no way for Google to search through your site and quickly crawl which pages have internal links.
But, with the orphan post section, you are able to track which pages are orphaned and need attention. If you want your whole website and internal architecture to be very connected and easy for Google to crawl and understand, then you should not have any orphaned pages at all costs.
Tracking orphaned pages manually is very difficult and takes a lot of time because there is no way of quickly seeing this information. That’s why Link Whisper is such a powerful and useful plugin for WordPress.
Additionally, it doesn’t really cost that much per month but will save you hours of frustration.
Step 3: Manually Add Relevant Links
The third and final step is to go in and manually add internal links where necessary across your site.
Link Whisper or other WordPress plugins are fantastic tools, but they’re not perfect. That is why it is important for you to manually add some internal links yourself.
These links could be on the footer, navigation page, or even across all of your articles. You have to remember that when it comes to internal link building, you are trying to tell Google which are the most important pages on your site.
Obviously, if you have a sales page or any sort of page that makes money for your site, then you want to internally link to those as much as possible. When you do, it will funnel in more authority and link juice, and drive more traffic and money to your most important pages.
Remember, it’s not just the search engine traffic that will be directed on your money making pages. If you can make your website funnel all of your traffic to these pages, this will not only improve your SEO, but bring in more people coming from social media and other sources of traffic.
When you’re building backlinks and using off-page SEO to get links to your site, this funnels link juice and authority from other websites to your pages.
What you can also do is filter the link juice to other pages on your site so that they can rank higher and have more authority. And the best way to do all that is with internal link building.
Check the pages that you’re building links to right now and identify where you can add more internal links. By mapping out the best ways to funnel authority from other sites to yours, your pages will rank higher on Google and you will start making more profit.