Power Up Your Site’s Internal Linking for Impressive Outcomes

If your website is filled with awesome content yet suffers from low visibility on Google sarch, there might be a number of reasons including low-ranking power, few relevant backlinks from credible, authoritative websites, and poor internal linking.

Linking has never gotten much respect, and Google has weakened its role in the overall ranking system. Yet, links play a powerful role of content cohesion, resonance and ranking power distribution in the site. Your content is a team, and if your content works together (via links) it will raise your rankings and help you convert more visitors.

Linking for visitors is about navigation on your site and about creating content channels however, Google sees your internal links differently.

Links are a Multifaceted Tool

Originally, links were pathways to further information.  Today, they serve numerous purposes and we’re going to be strategic and tactical about how to use and implement links in our content.

We need to do it skillfully to get the best SEO performance gains. Otherwise, we’ll waste our precious ranking power, disturb the users content experience and confuse the search engines. The difference then isn’t just rankings and the volume of traffic we get from Google. It’s also the quality of those referrals, informing them, and moving them through your funnel. There is a correlation between good linking and bottom-line lead and revenue generation.

This challenge discussed here is only part of a significant level of SEO knowledge we must have today. For me, it’s all about keeping up with search engine advancements and the subtleties of advanced optimization. It drives how I will develop your content, making it compelling for Google and the AI search engines. As you’ll read below, it’s very complex. Hopefully, this introduction will give you confidence in the power of good linking within SEO.

Google understands the meaning of your content, keyword relevance and whether your site has enough “EEAT” in it to warrant being ranked. Yes, we shape Google’s understanding and rating of our content. We don’t leave this to fate. Every word, topic and keyword in our copywriting is assessed for relevance and importance. We educate Google about our brand, products, purpose, relevance and quality. We make ours the most significant.

You might have incredible individual pages, and Google is an individual document ranking website. You could have one high-ranking page while Google considers the rest junk.  And the reason Google’s not thrilled about your content is that your internal links don’t create the “big picture” view of credibility and mastery that gives them confidence, that you the author are credible and your information is accurate and significant.

Shaping Ranking Power and Content Meaning Through Linking

Back in 2002 when I published my first SEO book, I touched on something powerful for rankings. It was dubbed PageRank shaping by some.  PageRank was the ranking power awarded by Google to pages and domains. Pagerank became the “power” of a page, that is also transferred to other pages that it links to. This “shaping” practice was about sending Pagerank within the site and onto key pages to get rankings on important keyword phrases.  We made the most of the meagre ranking power our client’s web pages possessed.

It’s a common scheme to link excessively to our top high-ranking pages from our other content to help it rank better.  This tactic isn’t appreciated and is considered either overoptimization or spam, and can reduce your site’s trust factor.   As advanced SEO pros, we strategize channeling pagerank in sophisticated ways, funneling it through link anchor text. This topic-sensitive pagerank technique means pagerank/ranking power is attached to specific keyword phrases themselves.  What’s transferred via the links is ranking power, cues, signals, and the keywords themselves in an information packet stored by Google.

Through the thousands of internal links in our site, including text word anchor links, Google should get a clear message about the overall meaning of your content page and whether it covers a topic well. Your internal links lead Google through each piece of content for processing.  And the links help solve the users puzzle — so it is helpful. Helpfulness is a major component of the ranking algorithm.

Google and AI LLMs can evaluate the coherence of your perspective (clear or confused) along with the accuracy and tone of your content – all as evidence of your authority and trustworthiness.  Links are a part of that coherence.  If you use hype, spammy words, with off-topic linking, and an inappropriate tone, it may devalue their respect for your content.

Internal linking then is a key ranking factor for many reasons.

Purposeful, Organized but Cleverly Crafty

Crafty, intelligent internal linking is very effective on powerful high pagerank (domain authority) websites. These big sites wield their massive link juice and domain authority to win more ranking battles on long tail phrases. So everyone’s wised up about using their internal links well. Some have used them to misrepresent their content, but we don’t need to do that.

Google wants unique info, with natural, varied use of links and words, along with a rich, well-spoken vocabulary. This gives us a chance to be uniquely creative and use our most clever and crafty techniques and strategies.

Give Search Engines Clear Signals

We want give Google clear signals about which pages matter most and how they relate to each other. Our linking strategy should:

• have a basic, logical content structure (topic clusters/pillars): Core “pillar” pages (almost always blog posts) target broad keywords, or competitive keywords, or specific high-converting phrases we must win.  Cluster pages, often blogs, product pages, customer review pages, topic/user guides, FAQs, etc.) cover related subtopics and link back to your pillar pages.
• distribute link equity efficiently: we link to key pages in our strategy so Google will spider them more, from different perspectives, and this boosts their search presence. We link out from key pages to others that need some ranking power, but utilize keywords that won’t confuse Google about which page should rank for our top traffic pages.
• anchor text matters: Use a defined selection of descriptive, keyword-rich (but natural) anchor text to tell Google what the linked pages are about, and to build an overall authority/coverage of our key topics.
• keep links contextual: Place links within the main body of content in related content where Google values them, using variations/related words, to avoid over-optimization penalties and reader boredom, while still pushing ranking power into those pages.
• avoid overlinking: Focus on quality and relevance, not raw link quantity — use links expertly to maximize their message and ranking power impact.

In essence, strategic internal linking is about organizing and presenting your content in a systematic process that makes Google believe in your content’s topical authority and the user’s content experience.

Building Content and Entity Maps

The strategy of internal linking is evolving as experts develop new concepts about it.  I like the description that Kevin Indig uses, “Building your own semantic map that Google can trust.”  It sounds like a simple thing to build and execute in content, but at the advanced level, we’re trying to get a lot done with our ranking power and content goals. The demands of content are almost outrageous.

Mapping out your internal linking scheme is necessary. We map out the entities or things (words, topics, events, people, places etc.) because search engines want to understand the connections between all of them (we’re going to help Google understand :) .  In fact, entities are another helpful layer in the ranking factors that help Google bypass link spam. They can understand the content from another perspective and thus not get fooled by the many types of spam/misrepresentation that are rampant on the Internet. That’s particularly helpful in denying sites that have malicious content and intent.

Entities are the essence of a searcher’s problem (e.g., “what time of year is best for senior couples to visit the Amalfi coast area of Italy?”). Look at a keyword search or a question and you see it’s full of different entities such as time, people, relationships, places, countries, and quality.  We want our content to resonate with all these entities just as they show up in long questions.

I map entities on a flow chart so I can visualize what the bigger topic is and all of its influential elements. All the pieces are there in front of me. I don’t know where Google is coming into the site, but I know if I create a link picture that’s consistent and purposeful, it makes the content more credible, trustworthy and deep. And your SEO content hiearchy will be illuminated as well. This is separate from your company’s content categorization for customers (served in your drop-down nav menus).

SEO Does Involve Ingenious, Unique, Crafted Internal Link Schemes

Because they’re more powerful and resonate really well with what search engines want. If we want their traffic, we need to serve search engines.

And AI search engines will follow similar link paths if they spider your content as part of their training process.  Booth Google and ChatGPT get this picture through reading your content and the link path they follow. It’s a journey of discovery and we’re the captain of the ship. And when you map out the content experiences you want established for them to spider, you’re able to craft how you’ll link a cluster of relevant pages or sections of intense content so that it supports your content’s credibility and helpfulness to users.

All of the crafty things you can do within a site are wonderful, but likely not that interesting for you as a business owner. Take joy in the fact that someone actually likes this stuff!

Links are powerful pointers and communicators, essential parts of the content experience so we need to craft them intelligently. And yes, there is more art to this than you might expect. Meanings can be refined and clarified and enriched.  This is basically the practice of search engine optimization.

Entering AI and Information Entities

The aforementioned Kevin Indig, an SEO expert, introduced the theme that is beyond internal linking schemes to something called entity maps. He wasn’t sure about whether AI search engines can spider content via links. They can access sites directly, and they’re known to add the urls of sites their training models can assimilate. Unfortunately, they’re not a ranking search engine, so any lists they present are not always the best quality (your opportunity).  Instead they process content as a collection of text, so they don’t pass pagerank or keyword data through links.

AI LLMs process the value of your content based on the rules of its training model. It looks for entities to understand the relationship between them.  We want to use our content and linking to help them discover those relationships. We’re aiding their spidering process so they can find our entity and content mapping — where they fall into our persuasion process.

I’ll delve further into this topic of information entities and contextual mapping for AI search engines.  It’s a dual thing for traditional SEO where we’re synchronizing SEO and content strategy (focus of my 2017 book), and to present our content for their AI text system.

Wrapping Up our Internal Linking Strategy

When we combine content organization and purposeful link mapping with clever copywriting and rich content experiences, we create something very compelling for search engine users. And when they find value and pleasure in our content, search engines do see their behavior. Good content experiences help to raise our rankings and visibility even more.

I’m sure you’re feeling mentally exhausted right now, and good on you that you read this far. That makes you a great client prospect for me. I like composed, calm, and reasoned clients who are able to get the best out of me.

If you’re hoping for great performance from SEO, I might be the right provider. If you’re serious about succeeding, please reach me at 416 998 6246. Looking forward to our chat.