Need advice on internal links

[Gautam]

I run a couple of gadget/technology based blogs, which essentially has news based articles and long form articles such as reviews, tutorials, and tips. Looking for some advice on the strategy for internal links:

We have been using internal links in the following ways in articles so far:

1. Links to the category pages at the end of the article (we call it related topics)
2. Links to category pages wherever relevant preferably in the first paragraph. The logic here was that if we can add the link to a category in the first paragraph, which appears on the home page and category page, it will pass the link juice to the category page.
3. Link to relevant articles, mostly by using the full title of the post as we thought that it stands out.

Issues with the current strategy:

1. In the case of the 1st strategy, it doesn't seem that natural, so we are not sure if people actually end up clicking them.

2. In case of the 2nd, we have couple of concerns:

3. it could result in linking to a category page twice. One within the article, and the second at the end of the article because of strategy 1.

4. Because the first paragraph also appears on the category pages, it would mean that in some cases we will be linking to the same category page (recursive).

5. In the case of the 3rd strategy, the problem is it does not appear natural so we are sure if it increases the value of the content.

I was wondering if we should adopt the following strategy:

1. Get rid of category links at the end of the article.
2. Avoid linking to the category pages in the first paragraph, instead link to the category pages after the first paragraph, so we don't end up with the issue mentioned in b. i. Alternatively, we could remove the excerpts from the category pages so we don't hit the issue of linking to the category page from the category page.
3. Add links more naturally. So have a sentence which talks about the related article and link to it using partial match (keyword phrase) or exact match.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Gautam]

Hi James,

Thanks for the response. I am looking for the best practices. Actually, I was thinking of adopting strategy mentioned towards the end of the article, which includes 1 and 2 as well.