Does adding a category link into an article body help with SEO?

Question

I have a news website and I'm looking to improve the SEO ranking of our website. Looking at other websites, the Guardian, for example, they add in category links to the body of their articles. I assume this is to improve SEO, should I be doing the same? And how do they pick the category to link to? It seems random to me.

For example, in this article 'prostate cancer' is linked to https://www.theguardian.com/society/prostate-cancer. Where I'd imagine that for internal link building (which I guess is what they are doing) it would be more beneficial to link to the AI category.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/04/its-going-create-revolution-how-ai-transforming-nhs

Answer 1

The first link [...]/society/prostate-cancer is a cornerstone article, meaning it is a collection of articles about a specific topic so that visitors can find them all bundled together. If you have an article about prostate cancer, it makes sense to link your cornerstone page of prostate cancer related articles to it.

They could also had linked to the second link, assuming the second link is directly related to the first, which -in this case- is. Them linking to the fist link and not the second, does not invalidate also linking to the second one. It is not like linking to the first link automatically forbids also linking to the second, but since the first link is a cornerstone link, it should always be linked since it is beneficiary for SEO.

I should also add to technically answer your question, that linking to the category of articles in which a specific article corresponds does help with SEO, as it boosts the ranking of the category and also presents a well organized content. Being able to reach each article through a landing (cornerstone) page about a specific article topic does indeed boost SEO.