WordPress internal linking: the guide to boosting your SEO

Have you created a WordPress site and are wondering why your traffic is stagnating? Internal linking could well be the key to unlocking your SEO. In this SEO guide, we’ll explore the basics of internal linking and show you how to optimize it to improve your site’s visibility. Whether you’re a beginner or looking to hone your skills, this guide is for you. Get ready to turn your site into a traffic-generating machine!

What is internal linking in SEO?

Internal linking in SEO is a fundamental technique that consists in connecting the different pages of a single website by means of internal links. This strategy considerably enhances the user experience by facilitating navigation and guiding visitors to relevant content, while prolonging their time spent on the site.

From a technical point of view, internal linking helps search engines to crawl and index pages more efficiently. By defining logical paths between content, it highlights the most important pages and reinforces their authority. Good internal linking therefore contributes to better organic visibility and optimized search engine positioning.

Before continuing, make sure you understand what a link anchor is:

Best practices in internal linking to boost your SEO

Internal linking is an essential component of SEO, but contrary to popular belief, it’s not enough to place a few links at random to reap the benefits. Internal linking is complex and needs to be carefully thought through: each internal link has a role to play in conveying authority, user navigation and search engine understanding of your site. Poorly designed, it can dilute SEO impact or confuse the user experience.

But don’t panic: in this guide, we’re going to simplify the concept by showing you concrete, practical examples. You’ll see how to link your pages together intelligently and how to avoid the most common pitfalls.

Disambiguating internal links, or the art of making yourself understood by indexing robots

As its name suggests, disambiguation internal linking aims to clarify the meaning and structure of a website’s content by helping search engines to better understand the relationships between pages. By strategically linking articles or pages dealing with similar or complementary subjects, we eliminate grey areas regarding the context, search intent and relevance of a piece of content. This not only directs users to useful resources, but also tells Google which pages are the most important on a given theme, while avoiding the risks of semantic duplication or cannibalization.

The aim is not to put links everywhere, but to direct users and search engines to the content you want, without forcing their hand.

Be as precise as possible to avoid confusion and unwieldiness

Internal links must be optimized for SEO (indexing robots) but also for users. So it’s not possible to put links everywhere, or to create links that are two sentences long. Each link must fit naturally into the content, with a clear, concise anchor that is consistent with the destination page.

Too many links or too long anchors impair readability, break the reading rhythm and can even create confusion. A good link is above all a fluid experience: the user understands why he’s clicking, where he’s going and what the added value is (if he clicks and is interested).

Example:

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Another example for the road:

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Vary your link anchors: phrases and word groups

Users can search for your content under a whole host of different keywords, each with its own expressions and way of speaking. It’s precisely for this reason that it’s essential to vary your link anchors by using different expressions and groups of words.

By varying anchors, we adopt a more natural approach that better reflects the diversity of Internet users’ language. Each person can formulate the same search intention in multiple ways, and it’s strategic to integrate this variety into your site’s mesh. This not only avoids over-optimization, but alsobroadens the semantic scope of content. A link doesn’t have to be attached to a rigid keyword. It can also blend in with a phrase or expression that makes sense in context.

Orphan pages: the SEO opportunity you may not know about

On a website, every page should ideally be part of a coherent internal mesh. However, it often happens that certain pages are not linked to any other: these are known as orphan pages. Invisible to users and search engines alike, these pages may exist without really contributing to your SEO. And therein lies a little-known SEO opportunity: by strategically reintegrating them into your structure, you can reinforce your site’s authority while improving its crawlability.

Orphan pages are sometimes forgotten product sheets, unrelated blog posts or pages created for specific campaigns. Although accessible via their direct URL, they are absent from the user path and receive no internal links. This severely limits their indexing and, consequently, their ability to generate organic traffic. And yet, they can contain high-quality content with high commercial value.

Discover also how to set up a semantic cocoon to power a page :

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