Internal Linking as a Content Promotion Tool

When you think about "content promotion," you probably think about external channels like social media and email marketing. But one of the most powerful and overlooked promotion tools is your own website.

Internal linking—the practice of linking from one page on your site to another—is not just a crucial SEO best practice; it's also a highly effective way to promote your new content to both your users and to search engines.

By strategically adding internal links to your new blog posts from your existing pages, you can significantly speed up their discovery and improve their performance.

Why Internal Linking is a Powerful Promotion Tool

1. It Helps Users Discover Your New Content

Your website's visitors are not going to see every new blog post you publish. But if a user is reading an older, popular article on your site, and you provide a relevant, contextual link to your new post within that article, you are creating a natural and helpful path for them to discover your new content. This can drive a steady stream of engaged, internal referral traffic.

2. It Helps Search Engines Find and Index Your New Content Faster

Search engine crawlers discover new content by following links. When you publish a new blog post, it can sometimes take a while for a crawler to find it, especially if it's not linked to from anywhere else.

By adding internal links to your new post from other pages on your site (especially from high-traffic pages), you are creating a direct path for the crawlers to follow. This can significantly reduce the time it takes for your new content to be discovered, crawled, and indexed by Google.

3. It Passes "Link Equity" and Boosts SEO

Some pages on your website are more authoritative than others. Your homepage and your most popular, most-linked-to blog posts have the most "link equity" or "PageRank."

When you link from one of these high-authority pages to your new blog post, you are passing some of that authority and ranking power along. This can give your new post a significant SEO boost right from the start and can help it to rank faster and higher.

A Simple Strategy for Internal Link Promotion

You should make internal linking a standard part of your content publishing workflow.

Step 1: When You Publish a New Post, Link Out to Older Posts

As you are writing your new blog post, you should always be looking for opportunities to link to your other relevant, existing content. This is a standard best practice.

Step 2: When You Publish a New Post, Go Back and Link to It

This is the promotional step that many people forget. After you hit "publish" on your new article, your job is to go back to your older content and find relevant places to add a link to the new post.

How to do it:

1. Identify Relevant High-Authority Pages: Make a list of your top 5-10 most popular and authoritative existing blog posts that are thematically related to your new post. You can find your top pages in Google Analytics.
2. Find a Relevant Context: Go into the editor for each of these old posts and find a sentence or a paragraph where a link to your new post would be a natural and helpful addition for the reader.
3. Add the Link with Descriptive Anchor Text: Add the link using keyword-rich anchor text that describes what the new post is about.

Example: Let's say you just published a new, in-depth guide on "how to choose a color palette."

• You would go back to your older, popular post on "how to design a logo."
• You would find a sentence that mentions the importance of color.
• You would then add a link like this: "...choosing the right colors is a key part of the process. We've written a complete guide on how to choose a brand color palette that you can read here."

By spending just 15-20 minutes on this process every time you publish a new post, you can create a powerful internal promotion engine.

Conclusion

Don't let your new content sit on an island. Internal linking is a simple, free, and highly effective way to promote your new blog posts. It helps your users to discover more of your valuable content, it helps search engines to find and index your new posts faster, and it helps to pass your website's authority to your new content to give it an initial SEO boost. Make it a non-negotiable part of your publishing checklist.