What are the most effective ways to link to other pages on your website?

Some of the effective ways to link to other pages on your website include: navigation menus, footer links, internal text links within content, breadcrumbs, related posts/resource sections, call-to-action buttons, category pages, sitemaps, tags and labels. Ensure that the links are relevant, easy to understand, and not excessive. Properly organized and well-labeled links will help users find what they're looking for and improve the SEO of your website.

First of all, I Identify the most valuable pages (MVP) of a website. You can easily find them using tools like Google Search Console & Google Analytics. Just analyse the pages for the metrics important to your goals, such impression, events, conversions etc. After identifying MVPs, create a strategic internal linking plan. Decide right anchor texts for each MVPs (use primary keywords as anchor text) and link them from closely related subpages (Creating Topical Relevancy). This way you can create contextual relation between related pages, and increase relevance score of the web page for a given topic. This approach will increase chances of your valuable pages ranking higher and making them more visible in search results.

A bit more advanced tactic for finding relevant pages could be using word embeddings and vector data bases. You can then use cosine similarity to find pages that are similar based on the text on the pages. This would still require some human touch to vet the lists created but could be a way to help speed up the process and also help finding linking opportunities for newer articles on your site. You can also tie in APIs from different tools, like GSC or SEMRush, to find potential keywords to use.

Here are few Types of links I always follow: 1. Contextual links- Contextual links appear in the main body of the content on a page. They’re used to expand on ideas, refer to resources, and define terms, which direct readers to other relevant content. 2. Header- Footer Navigation- Header links are some of the most important internal links on your website through which visitors navigate. (Products/ Services categories, Resources, etc). Footer links include links to contact page, privacy policy, & other important pages on your website. 3. Breadcrumb links- Breadcrumbs allow users to trace their journey back to the homepage. Eg: Home/Service/SEO service. They give users a clear visual representation of the website’s hierarchy & orientation.

In my experience, 2-3 links relevant to the paragraph can be used per 500 words. Also, avoid repeating the same destination links on a single page.

Remember, Google loves good quality ORGANIZED content. When I say organized, it means that Google needs to know if you can direct your user down the right pathway. This is why internal linking is so important. The easiest way to keep track of your internal links - is to use the age-old search query string: site:website.com keyword. This will pop up all the blogs/pages that you have that include the keyword and you can then go on a spree to link them back to your page.

I highly recommend keeping track of the anchor text you use for your pages. I often do SEO audits and come across good anchor texts being used, but the same text gets mapped to different pages. This essentially dilutes your targeting to your web pages.