Optimizing your website for higher rankings is an increasingly complex endeavor that often requires hours of meticulous keyword research, careful attention to site performance and user experience, and plenty of backlink outreach to increase your domain authority.

Improving your WordPress SEO doesn’t always have to be this difficult however. There are still a few less-complicated techniques out there that are far easier to implement yet will still have a meaningful impact on how your website performs in Google.

One simple strategy that anyone can take advantage of and which will help boost the overall quality of your website is through a better understanding and implementation of internal linking. With the right internal linking strategy, your website will appear more authoritative to search engines and will increase the quality of your user experience. The best part is, working on your internal links may be one of the easiest search engine optimization improvements you can make for your WordPress website. By investing a little bit of time every month to making sure all of the important pages of your site are getting enough attention, you will boost your site’s ranking potential a great deal.

How Search Engine Crawlers Use Internal Linking

When a search engine crawler such as the Google Bot crawls a page on your website, it’s looking for a few key ranking indicators. Search engines pay close attention not only to what links point to a particular page, but also how a page “links out” to other places on your site as well as other destinations on the Web.

If a page of your website appears to have no internal linking, it may send a signal to Google that this page has nothing to say that is valuable, or is not trying to prove any sort of a point. If you are not “referencing” any other important pages on your website or elsewhere, the search engine in question may assume that the page does not exist to solve user problems or address their needs, but instead is something else, such as a disclaimer or terms of service page.

Regardless of how the intent behind your page is interpreted, the search engines want to see certain elements on a page to consider it worth ranking. The same philosophy behind backlinking works here. A backlink is essentially a link from another website pointing to yours, which sends a signal of authority and trust to the search engines.

When you link to another page on your website in the proper context, you are essentially saying “this page reinforces the page I am linking to,” creating a network of contextual relationships that help search engines to understand the overall purpose behind a page or your entire website for that matter.

If you are creating a webpage that discusses a certain topic, and you already have content on your website related to this topic, you can and should use that older page as a resource that you can link to, or vice versa, as long as it makes sense. In this way, you create a roadmap for the search engines to follow as they crawl your website, helping them to make sense of it all.

Improving Your Internal Linking Strategy

So how do you improve your WordPress SEO with internal linking? The good news is that WordPress makes it easy to place links in the body of pages and posts, which means you don’t really have to do any heavy lifting here. The point is to help build a network of information using the pages you already have, keeping in mind that as you add pages and blog posts to your website, you should be linking to your older content so it has a better chance of ranking.

To begin working on your internal links, take a look at your oldest blog posts and look for ways to refurbish the content by adding more information and supporting keywords where applicable. As you are working on this older content, be sure to include one or two relevant links to supporting content elsewhere on your website. This can be a product page that addresses user needs based on the topic of the page, or another blog post that you have recently posted that may contain important information you want your readers to see.

Repeat this process for all of your older content that may be underperforming. This includes product pages that you think could do well with contextual linking to a relevant blog that could help provide necessary supporting information for your customers. This strategy works regardless of which niche or industry you are in. The search engines want to see that all of the pages of your website provide solid and valuable internal linking.

If you are interested in improving your WordPress SEO even further, give us a call at 267-225-1946 and our team of SEO specialists will help you with your internal linking, backlinking, on-page optimizations, blogging, and more.