Most, if not all, marketers consider internal linking as one of the most important ranking factors of on-page SEO. Though not as important as backlinks, internal links also have a lot of benefits for your website. But, managing and incorporating them into your website can be quite the challenge.
Manually adding links into your content is time-consuming, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of pages within your website. Luckily, WordPress plugins have been introduced to help you manage your internal links with ease.
With these internal linking plugins for WordPress, you can quickly update your old content and incorporate new and relevant links. These techniques are proven to help boost your on-page SEO, which in turn increases your chance of getting a higher rank on search engines.
There are a lot of internal linking plugins out there. What will you choose to download? In this article, we will give you a quick overview of the most reliable internal linking plugins that you can use to improve your website.
Internal Links: Are they that Important?
Internal links are undoubtedly beneficial for SEO. But, to what extent?
Here are the reasons why you should incorporate internal links to your website.
Enhanced User Experience (UX)
Through internal links, users get to navigate your site with ease. Internal links are like bridges that connect two locations, and most of the time, these two locations are highly related.
After a visitor reads the content on your website and the information they got still lacks, the first thing that comes to their mind is to search again for more answers. But if your website has internal links pointing to the answers they need, they wouldn’t have to do another search. They’d just have to click the internal link to arrive at the page within your site that contains what they are looking for.
Internal linking gives a web admin the chance to create a clear path for visitors to find everything they need. If this is the case, your website gives visitors an excellent user experience.
Decrease Bounce Rate
As most marketers know, high bounce rates are one of the metrics that one should look out for. Bounce rates are used to know how many visitors visit your website and exit the same page without visiting other pages.
A high bounce rate can mean that a visitor often loses interest after viewing the page where they landed on. Unless your site is a single-page website, high bounce rates are definitely of great concern.
The good thing about internal links is that they help a lot in reducing bounce rates. Whenever visitors see and click internal links in your content that pique their interests, they will be led to another page on your website, thus continuing their engagement with your site.
When you get more engagement from visitors (a lot of clicks and they exit your site from another page), you get to reduce your bounce rates significantly. Plus, retaining visitors to your site for more extended periods can significantly boost your rankings.
However, placing internal links alone can’t do the job; you’d have to pair it with excellent content to ensure that you get the results you’re aiming for.
Link Juice
External links (backlinks) are links that come from other websites, and this type of link carries ‘link juice’ with it. A website can pass on its authority (link juice) to websites that it links on its content through links. Basically, if you receive links from high authority and trustworthy pages, your site’s authority can also increase.
Getting linked by websites is like getting votes from them, which means that your content is trustworthy and credible.
After receiving ‘link juice’ from backlinks, you shouldn’t waste it. You need to ensure that you maximize the juice through internal linking. Similar to the concept of external links, you can also spread link juice to pages within your site via internal links. Basically, if a page receives a lot of link juice, Google will interpret that it is among your most important pages.
One of Google’s methods to determine a page’s importance is identifying how many links are pointing to it. If Google sees that a page receives a significant amount of external and internal links, it will deem it as important and credible.
Optimized Internal Link Building
There are always ways on how you can optimize your internal link-building practices. Here are essential practices to ensure that all your pages are optimized:
- Check if you’re wasting link juice
- Identify key pages and their location
- Identify orphan pages and broken links
- Identify infinite pagination and redirect loops
Improving your internal linking structure proves to be very effective in improving your crawl budget and rankings. That is why you should always perform audits to see if the flow of link juice all over your site is good, there are no broken links and orphan pages, and people can easily access your important pages.
5 Internal Linking WordPress Plugins for Your Website
Internal Link Juicer
Internal Link Juicer is a powerful WordPress plugin when it comes to building internal links. This plugin can automatically build internal links once you’ve configured your keywords. You also have complete control over how the internal links on your website are made.
Internal Link Juicer is a very powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to whitelist specific posts, diversify anchor texts, customize your link output, and more! This plugin is perfect for affiliates, bloggers, agencies, and online businesses.
Some of the features of Internal Link Juicer:
Free Version:
- Diversify anchor text
- Automatic internal Linking
- Custom link output
- Configurable link behavior
Premium Version:
- Link posts within the same category
- Consider manually linked targets
- User-based access control
- User-defined links
- Premium support
Link Whisper
Link Whisper is among the excellent internal linking plugins for WordPress. This plugin gives you link suggestions in the form of ‘whispers,’ which can help you rank better in search engines while helping your visitors too.
What makes this plugin excellent is that it is powered by A.I. that gives automatic link suggestions while you’re writing your article in WordPress. Plus, it has a link reporting dashboard that shows you the number of inbound and outbound internal links and outbound external links. It also has a feature that allows you to add internal links to newly published blog posts!
Features of Link Whisper:
- Easy installation
- Automatic suggestions
- Excellent reporting system
- Gutenberg editor compatible
Yoast SEO
While many internal linking plugins are growing rapidly, Yoast SEO is still the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. This is because it has many features that include an internal linking feature that gives you link suggestions as you write your articles.
Interlinks Manager
Interlinks Manager takes a spot in the top internal link WordPress plugins since it provides a set of reliable tools in building internal links on your website. With this plugin, you can analyze your internal links and get a report on the number of internal links on your website and how many visits to your site were generated by internal links.
Interlinks Manager also has a feature that lets you estimate the link juice for each URL. Similar to other plugins, this plugin also gives out suggestions for posts that allow you to build relevant internal links.
Features of Interlinks Manager:
- Convert specific keywords into internal links.
- Internal link suggestions
- Link Analyzer
- Link Juice Calculator
- Link Tracking
- Automatic internal links
Internal Links Manager
Last on our list (but not least) is the Internal Links Manager. This WordPress plugin can easily set links to a URL you have provided. You just have to provide a set of parameters (keyword + URL), and you’re good to go. After this, the URL you have provided will automatically get linked every time you use the specific keyword you set as a parameter.
For example, if you want the URL ‘abcd.com/SEO’ to be linked whenever the keyword ‘SEO’ appears on your website, you just have to set the parameters as ‘SEO + abcd.com/SEO’ (keyword + URL). With this feature, you can build internal links quickly.
Features of Internal Links Manager
- Automated internal linking
- Easy to use
- Configurable keyword
- Custom link output
- One-click import and export
Achieve an Optimized Website through an Internal Linking WordPress Plugin
Plugins are essential for your website since they allow your site to perform things that it wouldn’t have been able to do. Plugins also minimize the risk of technical problems from occurring since the developers have already tested them a couple of times before launching them into the WordPress plugin directory.
Since internal links connect your content to let search engines understand your site structure and locate essential pages, it is vital to make sure that all internal links are optimized. You can do this by using WordPress plugins with features that focus on making your link-building efforts.
Installing any internal linking plugin won’t do. You’d have to pick the perfect plugin that will fit all your site’s needs.
If you’re still unsure what to install, you can start with Internal Link Juicer’s WordPress plugin.