Internal linking best practices
If you don’t get this content creation step right, you could be losing more than just page views.
There’s a story about a whale that’s been roaming the ocean alone since 1989. Scientists can hear him (he sings at a steady 52 hertz), but they can’t find him.
This is very weird for a whale because, like dolphins and primates, whales are social animals. They don’t usually talk to themselves. No one knows why old “52 Hertz” is all by himself at the bottom of the ocean crying into the void. But it’s got to be pretty lonely down there.
The world wide web is usually not a lonely place. In fact, the internet is so crammed with voices, most of the time it’s difficult to find a quiet place to hang out and reflect.
Despite that cacophony of voices, the way we connect with other voices is always the same. We click.
We click when we’re happy. We click when we’re angry. We click to make online purchases. We click to send emails, click when we consent to cookies, and click on information we want to find out more about.
Understanding the click economy
The biggest illusion I had in my early days as a web writer was that the links I clicked on were there to unite me with my fellow webizens. In other words, links existed so I never ended up like poor, old 52 Hertz.
If that were the case, I should have linked you to 52 Hertz’s story already because it’s genuinely worth reading and, like everything else on the web, it’s only a click away.
But I didn’t.
Call me selfish, but I want you to finish my story before you click on that one. And when you’re done reading my story, I’ll want to send you to other articles I’ve written about storytelling or even search engine optimization (SEO), which this article was supposed to talk about. (It will. I promise.)
If those fail to catch your fancy, I’ll keep trying with five hooks your readers won’t be able to resist or the copywriting trap most businesses fall into. Eventually — statistically — you’ll give in and click.
Internal linking: How it works and why you need it
Am I being pushy by insisting you click on my content and mine alone? Am I fixing the game? Am I, in fact, setting up an information dissemination system that has more in common with 52 Hertz all alone at the bottom of the ocean than the Athenian agora (where presumably community discussions originated two and half millennia ago, paving the way for Facebook and Twitter)?
Avoid gimmicks
To be clear, I wouldn’t suggest any business or entrepreneur turn their blog or website into an echo chamber that bombards readers with self-serving promos and SEO gimmicks.
That would be overestimating your audience’s patience and lowballing their intelligence. Because, yes, a reader will understand right away if your article on UX trends is just an empty container filled with keywords and links to your own products (ours isn’t, go ahead and click). You can’t build trust that way.
Be click-conscious
But I would suggest that the next time you click on a link as you’re skimming through a Daily Beast, Verge, or Wired article, you pay attention to where that link takes you. Spoiler alert: 90% of the time it will take you to another page on their website. Well-written, engaging, and useful, but more of their content just the same.
Again, that’s not because Wired aims to be the only voice on the web, but like any business, they do want to monopolize as much of your attention as they possibly can.
If they aren’t paywalling their content, businesses like Wired make their money through ads fed to you as you scroll. Keeping you engaged enough to linger, in other words, is how they pay the bills. The best way to delay your departure? Link you to more of what you want to read, a.k.a. link internally.
Making internal linking work for your business
Your content model might not be the same as Wired’s. You might not be selling space on your website to other businesses. But you may have services and products you want readers to see. Piquing their curiosity with links to other articles on your website is one way to get them to stick around long enough to finally make “the” click.
If you take the opposite tack and pepper your articles with external links to helpful sources (because, hey, the web is a community of interconnected voices), your odds of making your blog work for your business are, unfortunately, greatly diminished. Readers that click away rarely come back.
External links: Exceptions
When you do start publishing content (whether it’s on your website, or on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Medium), you won’t have a library of internal material to link to. What then?
That’s actually not a problem. A few external, or outbound, links to trusted sources to drive home a point isn’t going to kill your readership. Even better if you manage to get a shout out (or backlink) from the sources you’re writing about. (Sending a quick email to let them know you’ve published something about them never hurts.) In certain situations, outbound links might actually improve your SEO.
Outbound links can improve Google page ranking
External links can help Google’s army of web-crawling bots figure out who you are. If you link to human rights stories enough, Google will eventually get the point: your website is focused on human rights. Google, which suffers from a Marie Kondo-sized tidying OCD, loves fitting content into slots, and rewards websites that comply with their system with higher page rankings.
Use outbound links for “need-to-know” info and useful online tools
Likewise, if your subject is, say, Femme Android’s This Website Will Self-Destruct, linking is almost necessary. (In this case, I’m linking you to a mindful writing article we wrote on Femme Android’s project.)
Ditto if there’s a useful online tool or resource you feel your readers would really appreciate. If I were showing businesses how to design a Twitter drop, for example, I’d link them to tinyurl.com (this lets them shrink their links) or meyerweb.com (this lets them encode or decode URLs). It would just be making their lives easier. They’d still have to read my article to learn how to use them.
Internal linking: Pros and cons
Sure, internal linking has its drawbacks. It can be limiting, for one. For example, you won’t be able to link your readers to Cardi B’s cousin’s friend’s vaccine “issue” or anything like it on a whim ever again. (You don’t know how badly I want to link you to Cardi B’s cousin’s friend’s issue, by the way.) The good old days when your blog pages glowed with pink, yellow, and blue hyperlinks to useful (or not so) outside information are over.
On the other hand, internal linking is a great incentive to build up your content so that when you do want to talk about something topical or a little recherché, you’ve got material to link to. The more articles you write, the more internal links you can add. The more content you link to, the longer your audience visits.
Internal linking is good for organic SEO
And — drumroll — the more quality material you publish, the higher the chances a potential subscriber searching for relevant information will end up on your website organically (through search alone), and stay there. If you don’t want to feed Google’s already super well-fed offshore bank accounts every month with hundreds of dollars in ad spend, that’s the clever way to improve your SEO.
Internal linking can still be community-facing
When the US Navy first detected 52 Hertz, they didn’t know what it was. A whale crying at the bottom of the Atlantic Basin didn’t make much sense. It took a marine biologist named William Watkins to make that discovery. Decades later, 52 Hertz is still a mystery. And he’s still alone.
Internal linking won’t isolate you from the online community at large, even if it might feel that way in the beginning. In fact, if your articles are good enough, and you aren’t force-feeding your readers links (five to eight is plenty), you’ll probably see the opposite happen.
Your blog will become a resource for your readers, who will share your content with their own audiences. Once you get that kind of traction, a pretty amazing thing will start to happen: other blogs and websites building up their content will link to you. And that, as we like to say around here, could be the beginning of a beautiful readership.
