I'm building backlinks to a certain page on my website, optimizing for 2 keywords. Since I'm spending a lot of time building backlinks to this page should I also do heavy internal linking with the keywords that point to this certain page as well?

[C-Style]

Internal linking to match off page keyword optimization.

[C-Style]

Thanks for the input. For the company I'm working for we're doing a new blog and I plan on linking back to certain pages of the main site that are relevant to the blogpost.

[StalkerB]

Your internal linking strategy should be to help identify important pages. Assuming that they are important pages (since you're building links to them) then yes, you should link where relevent from other pages.

The links should be naturally editorial in nature and remember that only the first link counts - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts - so no need to put links to the same page over and over within the content.

I generally put up to 3 links (sometimes one, sometimes none!) in a single page of content and even if my navigation already links to the page I'll still put it in (as a caveat to the first link only rule).

Some things to think about when linking though.

1. If a user clicks this link now am I more or less likely to convert them? (whatever your conversion metric may be)

2. Is a link here useful to a reader or am I simply putting it in because the keyword matches?

3. Am I linking the most important pages through this content? If there are 10 keywords you could link to other pages from this content, which would be the best 3 to link to. (3 links isn't a hard rule, but less is more in this case)

4. Can I use a different variant of achor text on this page? For less important (linking from) pages, the link itself helps bots and users through the site. Using the same anchor text exclusively to link to pages on your site, while not a problem, isn't maximising your internal link potential. Variations of keywords internally can be good.

I'll leave you with something I noticed yesterday to do with internal linking.

On one of my sites I started a blog back in October. I linked to the blog from the main navigation, but from within the posts I started linking to a specific page about once or twice a week (3 pieces of content a week on average). Without any other influences (that I can think of) it has steadily increased from ranked 70th to 16th now (the page has been live for about 3 years, though hadn't moved much apart from the last 6 months).

The domain hasn't picked up much extra authority (though I appreciate the page is probably relying on DA) so, as far as I can tell, internal linking to show that this page is important has pushed it up the rankings.

To get into the top 3 I'll need to start building links to it specifically, but with a good domain, correct internal linking definitely works.

[IM_Learner]

Internal linking is always a preferred step in link building but doing anything heavily do more harm. Make sure to get internal backlinks from meaningful pages. Unnecessarily doing it just for the sake of doing is will do no good.