Optimize Internal Linking of articles for SEO.

Normally when a user visit your site, then he/she might stay on your site for a long time or might be the user can leave your site after one or two page-views. The presence of visitors on your site highly depends on your "linking strategy". Internal links are most important for both On Page and Off page optimization. Users are willing to visit the related topic links that seems important to them. Also, a visitor is willing to understand the article posted on some keyword/phrase which is important to the user.
All this can be achieved by making good internal links within a site. The articles that might relate to the description or explanation of some other article must be internally linked to each other. There are following main criteria for internal linking in a website/blog.

• Number/Quantity of Internal links.
• Quality/Relevancy of the Internal Links.
• Navigation depth Rules.

These three things are most important while creating internal links for your website or blog. Internal links help in keeping visitors busy on the site.

1. Quantity of Internal Links: You might have noticed that the home page of a website/blog have the highest PR (Page Rank) that other pages of the website. The reason is that- Home Page has more back links. Almost every page of the website has a link to Home Page, which increases the relevancy of the Home Page and in turn increase its Page Rank. It doesn't mean that you should provide every page's link to every other page, that would be considered as Spamming.

• There should be at-least three or four page links provided through the keywords/phrases of the articles. This provides a genuine look the linked articles and also help in discovering new articles of visitor interest.
• There should be some featured sections like- Top Articles/Products section, Top rated products, Popular Articles section etc. these are the most effective ways of linking different articles in an effective manner.

2.Quality of Internal Links: Including a couple of links in an article to other pages is not enough. These links must be of good quality. The links should be highly relevant to the linked page or article. You should consider following criteria for high quality internal links.

• Target Keyword: While targeting a particular keyword or phrase, make sure that the link text must contain that keyword or phrase. This provide high relevancy of the link to that phrase. The optimized keyword or phrase must reflect the idea of the linked article or the liked page.
• Link Placement: The area of placement of the internal links also have a great impact on the effect of the link on Search engine. It is considered that- Early a link placed, More will be the priority of the link. So, at-least on link should be provided to each paragraph of the article.

3. Navigation depth rule: It is also called as page Depth. It means, how many links are clicked to reach a particular linked article. And, the best practice is that every article must be reached in maximum 4 clicks. That is- Page depth must never be more than 4. Different Page depth criteria to keep in mind while creating links are-

• Home page must be reached in a single click. Home Page's page depth must be 0.
• Category page may have Page depth of 1. That is- after clicking on a link, visitor should reach the category page. Number of clicks to reach a category page should not be more than 1.
• Articles List may have page depth of 2. Visitors must reach the articles list after 2 clicks.
• Content may have page depth of 3. That is- Visitors or users must reach there targeted content within 3 clicks.

Providing good internal linking structure boosts your sites traffic. So, Try best to link the articles.