While many website owners focus on obtaining external links, it’s easy to miss internal link building, which is still an effective way to boost rankings for other pages within your website and the the best part of Internal Linking is that you have complete control over the implementation!

To get the highest possible return for your SEO, follow these simple guidelines to ensure internal links are working to improve your rankings.

1. Optimise the anchor text
You should ensure your anchor text targets your core keyword for the page. This is a good tactic to use in site-wide footer links, or even in the navigation, provided what you put there still makes sense for your visitors.

2. Ensure all links are do-follow
Google ignores link value from any links marked as “nofollow”, so make sure that you haven’t marked internal links with the “nofollow” attribute.

3. Use content based links where appropriate
Aside from the main navigation and footer links, linking to the main pages within the body text of your web page is another way to help rankings. Remember that it’s important to use your target keywords as anchor text, but make sure the actual text fits within the context of the sentence, so that the link doesn’t look out of place or seem irrelevant

4. Keep the total link numbers low
Make a note of the total number of links on any given page and try and keep this number as low as possible. This is because individual link “juice” is divided amongst ALL the links (external and internal) on the page, so the less links you have, the more value each link is going to pass on. Having hundreds of links on a page will dilute the effect of each link to almost nothing!

If you follow these simple guidelines, you should start to see some positive effect on the rankings for your keywords.