Internal Link Opportunities – Ahref

Internal linking is the discipline of improving on-page SEO and rankings of individual pages by utilizing the internal values of the existing pages. Internal linking will also improve the navigation and usability of the website by interlinking relevant content to help the user obtain the information searched for.

From a technical perspective, internal linking will assist search engines in understanding the relationship between the various pages on the website and rank them according to the search results.
An easy way to find internal linking opportunities on a specific website is to use the Internal Link Opportunities tool in Ahref. The tool or feature Internal Link Opportunities in Ahref will show the potential pages you can interlink based on the keywords each of these pages ranks for.

How to use Internal Link Opportunities

Start by adding the website to the Ahref Site Audit.

After the audit, you can access the feature below, Tools in the left-hand panel. The data presented here is framed as a report. The internal linking opportunities you see here are based on the keywords the websites’ pages are ranking for.

Here is a short explanation of the terminology used in the report:

• PR – measures the strength of the source page’s internal backlink profile
• Source page – the individual page where the keyword is located and does not link to the target page
• Source total traffic – estimated traffic of the source page
• Keyword – the keyword that the target page is ranking for
• Keyword context – the content context on the source page
• Keyword search volume – estimated average monthly searches for the keyword worldwide
• Keyword difficulty – measures the relative difficulty of ranking the keyword in the top 10 search results worldwide
• Target page – the page on the website ranking for the keyword
• Target position – estimated ranking position of the relevant keyword in organic search results worldwide
• Target traffic – estimate monthly organic traffic the target page is receiving from the specific keyword worldwide

The data we are interested in this report is:

Source page – this is the page where we can place an internal link

Keyword – this is the keyword we want to rank on the Target page and also a candidate for the anchor text we will use for the link

Keyword context – this is the sentence on the content where we will place the internal link

Target page – this is the target URL we will use in the internal link

How to set up the internal linking

It is essential to use the Internal Link Opportunities feature smartly. Ahref will provide you with factual data, i.e., the connection of individual pages and their keywords, but you must interpret this data intelligently. Refrain from placing an internal link from the source page to the target page with the Keyword as anchor and the Target page as URL. Review this small process: Look at the Source page and the Keyword context and decide if an internal link makes sense.

• If you decide it makes contextual sense to place the internal link, then evaluate if the Keyword is a good anchor-text or it needs to be tweaked a bit (be wary of doing too much exact-match-anchor interlinking)

• When satisfied with the anchor text, insert the internal link on the Source page using the Target page as the URL

Conclusion

Performing internal linking is an integral part of on-page SEO. It is an easy way to help rank important and valuable website pages. 

With the feature in Ahref, much of the initial data gathering is accomplished automatically. The important part is to take your time analyzing the report’s results and implementing them smartly.