Too many website owners and SEOs prioritize on-page optimization by ignoring internal links.
But did you know your web pages ‘tiny internal links can boost their keyword rankings? Even the most basic elements of your SEO performance can be significantly impacted by internal link-building alone.
Why? Because internal links are crucial for SEO, search engine crawlers must be able to properly index, comprehend, and promote your content. This article will cover all the fundamentals of SEO internal linking, including:
- Definition of Internal Linking
- Key Types of Internal Links
- Why Internal Linking is Important for SEO?
- How to do Internal Linking Perfectly?
- Advanced Internal Linking Techniques
The Definition of Internal Linking
The process of creating internal links to other websites on your website.
Internal links maintain users on your website, unlike external links or outlines, which are outlines that point to other websites. They should not be confused with “inlinks “or “backlinks,” which refer to external websites that point “in “to your website.
Your website’s architecture is also made up of internal links. Your internal linking profile forms the structure of your website if you imagine it as a pyramid with your homepage at the top.
Any page on your website should be accessible in three or fewer clicks, in your opinion.
Internal linking is a fundamental part of SEO because it teaches web crawlers which pages on your website are the most crucial, next crucial, and least crucial.
The use of buttons, clickable images, and anchor text, or the clickable portion of a link that leads to another page, are used to create internal links. What do the front-end and back-end of a website look like when they both have anchor text?
When a page’s targeted keyword is included in the anchor text, it increases the value of the page.
Key Types of Internal Links
You probably have several different kinds of internal links currently on your website. It’s crucial to understand their differences because they are at the heart of how visitors to your website navigate.
Your main navigation menu contains the most crucial internal links on your website.
Header Menu/Navigation Links
These permanently appear in your website’s header and represent the hierarchy of your site. They are typically organized by product categories, primary services, or main subject areas.
When visitors arrive on your website, these internal links let them know where the “next most important “pages are. Because they act like maps and direct users to where they should go next, they are known as navigation links.
Footer Links
Footer links stay the same as navigation links as they do when a user navigates your website’s various pages.
They should direct users to other significant pages on your website. You want your internal links in the footer to point the user to a different page if they haven’t found what they’re looking for by the time they scroll to the bottom.
In the footer of websites, you’ll frequently find links to resources like Contact Us, help, frequently asked questions, about pages, and other similar resource-type pages.
Sidebar Links
Sidebar links are frequently contextual links that also serve as navigational links.
Some websites ‘sidebars contain internal links that point users to popular or relevant content. Because a user may not necessarily be looking for something specific but is simply browsing from one page to another, sidebar links are very common for websites with a lot of content, such as news and recipe websites.
Within the body of a website’s content, in-text links are those that appear. They frequently appear in blog posts.
In-text internal links direct users to relevant information that they can access at their own pace rather than signaling importance or navigation.
Why Internal Linking is Important for SEO?
There are several advantages to adding internal links to your websites. Let’s examine how they can help you with your SEO strategy.
Improves User Experience
Relevant internal links make your website more user-friendly in the first place. This is especially true when visitors to your website visit it for the first time without having any prior knowledge of the content there.
Making user experience easier and quicker so that they can find what they are looking for increases the user experience and speeds up the process.
Increases User’s Time on Your Website
The user is less likely to return to a search engine or move on to another website in search of the information they are looking for thanks to internal links.
That results in longer page views and sessions. As long as your CTAs and conversion actions are properly optimized, the user will also have more conversion opportunities as a result of the longer time spent on the page.
If users visit your website using a Google search engine (organic traffic) and stay for an extended period, Google is also informed that they are finding the information they seek and that the content must be valuable.
Help Readers Learn More in Blog Posts
Your visitors can find even more information about your goods, services, or subject areas by linking to other pertinent blog posts on your website.
A lot of internal links to in-depth, high-quality blog posts also have the great benefit of enhancing users ‘perceptions of your brand’s industry expertise.
Easier for Google to Crawl and Discover New Pages
Any page on your website should be accessible from the homepage in three clicks, as previously mentioned, or less. Google’s crawlers won’t see a page if there aren’t any internal links or deep links to it on your website.
Making sure that the web pages you want to rank are search engine crawlers ‘easy to find and indexed is a crucial first step in increasing the visibility of your website on search engines.
Signal Relevance and Context
Google uses internal links ‘anchor text to interpret context and relevance according to various search terms.
Google is less likely to promote the page in the SERPs for related keyword phrases if the anchor text doesn’t match the content on the linked page.
However, having the appropriate anchor text can make Google understand the content of the linked page more fully.
This is why it is crucial to use the keyword when creating links.
Distribute PageRank
Internal links also aid in the spread of PageRank on our websites.
PageRank is a proprietary Google metric that measures a web page’s popularity as a percentage of its total links.
A portion of a page’s PageRank, or link equity, is passed along each time it links to another.
The more PageRank a page has, the better a page is for ranking in the SERPs, according to Google’s ranking algorithm.
Help Google Understand Your Authority on a Topic
If Google crawlers notice that your website has numerous internal links that point to authoritative content, they will recognize your website as a leader in relevant subject matter.
For instance, pages about anchor text, guest posts, backlink profile analysis, or other pertinent subtopics that deal with link building as a whole might also serve as links to a significant content asset about link building.
Learn How to Use Best Practices When Internal Linking
On-Page SEO requires internal linking to be a core component. However, internal animosity can affect your SEO performance negatively.
How to do you internal link to increase your ranking potential, then?
Use Descriptive, Keyword-Rich Anchor Text
Without optimizing the anchor text that makes up those internal links, the value of internal linking only extends.
Your page’s anchor text should, in essence, adequately describe the page’s content. Use exact, partial match, or contextual anchor text to indicate greater relevance to Google if you want your linked-to page to rank for a particular keyword.
Does your website have SEO functionality? With the free LOCALiQ Website Grader, you can get an audit right away.
Strategic Use of Dofollow/ Nofollow
Your internal links must be do-follow to be passed along PageRank. A robot search directive, Dofollow, instructs Google crawlers to follow the links on the page rather than ignore them.
Use the nofollow tag on pages that are not required to rank, such as “Thank you” or confirmation pages. Later, we’ll get into more detail, but if you’re internally linking to a page to improve its rankings, the link must include the following robot tag.
Link to Old Posts in Your New Blog Posts
No new blog post should be published on your website without providing internal links to other relevant content, in general.
If there is no natural connection between the two pages, keep in mind that you shouldn’t force internal links. That could harm your SEO.
Add it to your SEO content calendar if you still don’t have the relevant content on your website. With more high-quality articles that stay up for the long term on your website, internal linking for SEO becomes simpler.
Link to New Posts in Old Posts
In older posts, include internal links that point to any upcoming blogs you publish. Another mistake that many people make is that Google cannot find a page if there are no links to it, which is a great way to increase traffic to your evergreen content.
Make a regular effort to update your blog posts with internal links to the new content after publishing a new one. Crawlers will have an opportunity to index your new page as long as those internal links are present in your website architecture, but the further down it goes, the longer it will take.
You might want to link to the new page from older posts with a lot of backlinks so they can provide more information depending on the new page’s importance and potential ranking.
Monitor and Repair Broken Links
Internal links may break on your website over time as you update or update old content or alter the URL path.
When you change these crucial elements, some content management systems automatically add redirects, though not always. It’s crucial to regularly schedule link maintenance in your strategy so that you can quickly identify and fix any internal links that are damaged.
Otherwise, you could redirect users and search engine crawlers to dead pages. That not only makes your website look like it’s not being cared for, but it also makes Google less likely to rank pages for it overall.
Open on The Same Page
Your internally linked pages should open in the same tab after clicking, according to experts. Users can simply navigate to the previous page by pressing the back button.
External links should open in a new tab, which is the opposite of what is happening with external links. If not, your links instead take your visitor away from your website.
3 Advanced Internal Linking Techniques
Here are some more advanced internal linking techniques if you already have internal links strewn throughout your website and want to use them even more.
Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters
Pillar pages are high-level pieces of writing that provide in-depth information on a key topic. Internal links to comprehensive articles on the subtopics that are relevant to the main topic are present throughout the pillar pages.
Although developing pillar pages for your website takes a lot of time and resources, despite its conceptual complexity. However, having multiple topic clusters increases your internal linking authority and establishes your topical authority in Google crawlers ‘minds.
PageRank Sculpting
Through internal links and nofollow tags, your website can use its PageRank more strategically.
Site owners frequently give pages that don’t need to rank links equity. Since PageRank is already difficult to obtain, it is ineffective to waste it on pages that don’t offer value or convert visitors.
Google still considers PageRank as a measure of understanding the authority and worth of web pages, even though users can no longer see what their PageRank is. Because your homepage will have the majority of your site’s PageRank, those footer and navigation links are crucial.
This PageRank sculpting guide is helpful for more information on how to use this strategy.
Crawl Budget Optimization
Google only permits a certain amount of crawl budget for your website. That budget is easily exhausted by enterprise websites with thousands of landing pages. Enterprise websites can have thousands of landing pages that are not even in Google’s index.
SEOs frequently use a combination of internal links, sitemaps, and robot tags to ensure that Google’s web crawlers index their most valuable, highest-converting pages, despite having a more sophisticated approach.
Larger websites should be aware of their crawl budget and make appropriate adjustments, even though smaller websites shouldn’t have to deal with it.
Never Ignore Internal Linking
In summary, internal links on your website shouldn’t be left out if you want to increase website traffic and enhance the user experience.
Your internal links can increase the number of pages in Google’s index and improve its position in search results with a little planning and time.
All of those efforts will benefit your users, who are the most crucial stakeholders, by enabling them to find your content more frequently and convert more frequently. Learn from these SEO examples if you’re ready for more inspiration.