Internal links play a key role in the quality of your content and their optimization can help you in SEO and user experience (UX) and therefore generate more organic traffic to your site. Internal link building is a powerful SEO technique, especially for content marketing, and optimizing them can have a significant impact on your web page’s SEO and ensure it ranks higher in search engines.

Internal links also help to establish a hierarchy on your site, a better user experience, a higher conversion rate, and a more efficient website crawling. The fact that you have total control over internal links has made them a fantastic way to generate positive results.

In this article, we’ll go over what internal links are, why they’re important for SEO, types of internal links, and eight strategies you should consider when building internal links to help your web page’s SEO and UX.

Read More: 

Top 10 Ways to Increase Your Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR)

On-Page SEO:10 Essential Factors for Ranking on the First Page

Top 10 Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Site

12 Best Tips for Creating SEO-friendly Content

What Is an Internal Link?

An internal link, simply put, is linking your web page to another web page in the same domain for relevance. The design of internal links, especially the site’s main navigation, is the foundation of a site’s structure. Internal links can influence how Googlebot crawls your site, which impacts indexing, user experience, and how search engines view your site hierarchy even more than a submitted XML sitemap.

Google tries to look for many factors to detect the content of your pages. It detects your content better if it is linked to somewhere else on the web.  Through internal links, Google gets an idea of the structure of your content and its context.

What Is the Difference Between Internal and External Links?

Internal links point to pages in the same domain as the one from which they are created, i.e. they point to pages and articles on your own website. Internal links, unlike external links which are links from one website to another, are under your control.

Links to your site from other sites are important for traffic and SEO and are one of the factors in PageRank, which is one of the main ranking factors in SEO. PageRank is an algorithm named after Larry Page that evaluates the importance of a web page based on the relevance and authority of links pointing to it from other sites, also known as backlinks.

Another measure to determine the importance of a page based on its outbound links is known as CheiRank. Unlike PageRank, which measures the strength of inbound links to a page, CheiRank measures the strength of outbound links from a page and describes the degree of communication of a page in a corpus. In other words, it is a reverse PageRank.

What Are the Types of Internal Links?

There are two main types of internal links: navigation links and contextual links.

Internal navigation links

Internal navigation links are often implemented site-wide and form the navigational structure of a website. Their main purpose is to help users navigate as easily as possible through your website pages and find what they are looking for.

Navigation links appear in your site’s main menu, or in the footer of a site, or even in a sidebar. It can be a category page, the “About Us” page, or a landing page with a call to action. So navigation links are not as numerous, but having effective navigation in place is essential to creating an effective conversion flow.

Contextual internal links

Contextual internal links are typically placed within the body of a page’s main content to direct your users to interesting and related content. With contextual links, your pages are better connected internally, making users want to read more and stay on your site longer. As a result, you reduce bounce rate and increase user engagement.

In addition, contextual internal links allow search engines to know what content on your site is linked to and determine the value of that content. A clear and obvious contextual internal link with natural anchor text can simultaneously show relevance between pages and convey PageRank if the source page has authority.

Other interesting internal links that could be mentioned are:

– Nofollow internal links

Nofollow internal links are links that are not important for your website’s SEO. A nofollow tag tells Google not to follow the link. However, they are used when you have pages that do not need to rank well in search results.

For example, it is quite common to have the nofollow attribute to hide a link to an external domain or on comments to avoid user-generated content with spammy links that could disrupt the authority of the site. But adding a nofollow tag does not mean that these target pages will not be found in Google’s search results.

If you don’t want the pages or articles to appear in search results, you should also assign a noindex tag to them, which means that search engines should not give the content a place in the index to appear in search results. While dofollow links add value to the linked page, nofollow links make them useless for SEO.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable text that visitors see. You can see the anchor text containing the link in this image.

Make sure the anchor text looks natural and don’t add the exact same keywords in the anchor text of each link.

How Internal Links Help SEO

When it comes to SEO, many factors come into play in how search engines crawl, index, and rank websites, and internal links are among the most important.

Internal links help search engines understand the structure of your site.

Internal links help you create a site architecture that allows search engine crawlers to easily find relevant pages on your site and helps your users discover what they are looking for on your site. The use of optimized internal links is therefore a surefire way to help search engines find and index the pages on your site.

In addition, internal links can help demonstrate the contextual relationship between two pages. This can be a great way to illustrate your expertise if you have a large amount of authoritative content to weave through.

Internal links confer authority

Internal links are a signal of the relative importance of a page to Google. Building and optimizing internal links is one of the simplest things you can do on your site to boost indexing and ranking.

A good internal linking strategy helps pass authority between pages on your site and ultimately improves rankings. The more links a page receives, the more important it appears to search engines.

Therefore, good internal links are crucial for your SEO. The authority of a page is determined by an algorithm called PageRank (PR), by applying a value by many factors of which internal links are part.

Since Google considers a page that receives many valuable links to be more important, you increase the chances of that page being ranked. Internal links transfer authority from one page to another and increase the chances of other pages ranking.

If one of your pages has authoritative external links pointing to it, its PageRank score will be increased and that authority can then be passed on to other pages on your site through internal links. Identifying these types of “powerful pages” can help you make the most of the authority coming into your site to improve your rankings.

By transmitting link juice, internal links tell Google which pages are most important on your site.  While internal links don’t transmit as much link juice as backlinks and they don’t exactly increase your website’s authority, they can help you move some of your pages up in the search results.

Internal links help users navigate between relevant pages

Internal links are primarily used for site navigation and to maintain an easy-to-follow site structure. By helping your visitors find relevant and useful content, internal links are considered a great way to improve the user experience (UX), allowing users to stay on your site longer.

Internal links can guide visitors to high-converting pages and get them to take action

With the right internal links, you can guide your visitors and search engines to your most important pages. By adding internal links somewhere in the body copy of your high-traffic pages to your high-converting pages, you can entice users to buy and boost your marketing efforts.

To find your highest-traffic pages, you can check in Google Analytics under the Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages tab. On the right side of the landing page report, you can also see the conversion rate based on the goals you’ve already set, which gives you a quick idea of which pages are growing your conversion the fastest.

8 Internal Links Optimization Strategies for SEO & UX

It’s crucial for your site’s SEO as well as for users to regularly evaluate and improve your internal links. Adding the right internal links is one way to improve your website’s ranking ability by ensuring that Google understands the relevance of your pages, the relationship between your pages and their values.

To implement a good internal linking strategy, there are several elements to consider, of which the following steps are the most important. Here are the eight elements that must be present in your site’s internal link structure.

1. Determine the Structure of Your Site

Your site’s menu should reflect its structure so that the home page is at the top, and below that are the sections or categories, then eventually the subcategories, and below that the individual articles and pages. Building a site structure, creating a parent page and several child pages underneath, with links to the subpages showing a strict hierarchy is known as “siloing”.

Each of your pages should be relevant to the common topic and be linked to other pages in the same category. Creating such topic categories not only helps search engines understand the structure of your site and crawl it more efficiently but also makes it easy for users to discover the content they want.

It is, therefore, necessary not to have unrelated pages, also called orphan pages, because if they are listed in your sitemap, it is impossible for your users to find these pages without internal links by browsing your site. Still, remember to keep your website structure shallow.

The fewer clicks it takes to reach your articles from the home page, the better.  This has a big impact on users when it comes to the speed of your website, including page load time and the time it takes to perform certain actions. Therefore, it is essential to reduce the number of clicks needed to reach important landing pages and keep the site structure shallow.

2. Identify the Most Important Pages of Your Site

It is necessary to determine what is your most important, best, and most comprehensive content that addresses the core of your business and what you want people to find when they search for a topic or products you specialize in. A well-structured site has an authoritative hub page and topic groups linked to that hub page to let Google know that this is your most essential content.

Hub pages often target broad keywords with high search volumes that generate the most traffic for your business rather than more specific long-tail keywords that receive fewer monthly searches. Make a list of your most important pages yourself, thorough keyword research, and content strategy development.

 The most important pages on your site will be those that you have optimized for your top keywords, whether they are categories, products, services, or just great examples of informational content. If one of the authority pages you’ve identified doesn’t contain related content, instead of linking to it, consider creating new related content as part of your content strategy.

Carefully planning your hub pages and topic groups, helps you identify supporting content.

3. Add Contextual Links

When you have written several articles on a certain topic, you should link them together to show Google and users that these articles are related to a specific topic. A link in the main content adds new information and value to the text and therefore the text and keywords surrounding the content links also count towards the ranking of the target page.

When you link to another page on your site, you are sending an authority link to that page which can help that page rank higher in Google. These internal links are not nearly as powerful as links from other websites but they still help.

To do this, you should add a link to the main page in all related articles that will serve as supporting content to add depth to the topic and highlight the relevance of the topic and indicate that the main page is the most authoritative source. To have a well-organized site, also remember to link individual pages together.

You can create links directly from sentences in your text or add links at the end of your article. Make your internal links to related content open in a new tab, to make it easier for users to return to the first page they landed on.

4. Add Navigational Links

In addition to linking from related articles and pages, it is possible to boost the authority of your main content by adding links to it from the home page or top navigation. Normally, your home page is the most authoritative page on your entire website.

You should do the same with the articles and pages that are most important to your business. Adding links to key content or pages from the homepage or top navigation section will increase the link value of these pages and make them stronger in the eyes of Google.

It’s best to link directly from your homepage to important articles, which allows your homepage to focus on conversions. So, if you have a page or a set of pages that you want to index, create an internal link to that page or that page’s category from your site navigation:

5. Use Keyword-Rich Internal Link Anchor Text

The next part of the strategy is to use anchor text for your internal links. You can use your main target keyword as the internal link anchor text as long as it is relevant to the linked page and without over-optimizing by stuffing keywords.

Keyword-focused anchor text is obviously preferable to “learn more” or “click here”. In fact, Google even recommends that you use keywords in your anchor text and does not “generally” consider it harmful to use a lot of exact match anchor text in internal links.

But manipulating anchor text in this way for external links is a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. If you use the same anchor text, it can confuse your users.

Instead, try to diversify your anchor texts in a natural way while keeping in mind optimization for your keywords. Most importantly, don’t use the same anchor text for two different pages, as this is confusing for Google.

Instead, use different, descriptive anchor text for each page by creating internal dofollow links to send them to PageRank. Most of your contextual internal links should point to low-level pages, such as individual blog posts or product listings, with a preference for long-tail, low search volume keywords.

Read More: How to Use Long-Tail Keywords in Your Content Marketing Strategy?

6. Consider Adding Internal Links to Popular or Recent articles

Creating internal links to the most popular or recent articles on your website enhances the link value of those pages. Preferably create these sections in the sidebar or footer of your website so that they appear on all pages and articles.

By increasing the value of internal links to the most popular/recent articles from many different pages and articles, they will be easier for visitors to access, which will increase their traffic and send a positive signal to Google. Don’t forget to add at least a few internal links to each new piece of content from an authority page as well as those from the relevant topic group.

7. Create Internal Links from Traffic Pages to Conversion Pages

Some of your articles may attract high traffic but have a low conversion rate.  This is an opportunity to move your users from high-traffic blog posts to landing pages specifically optimized for conversion. You can use Google Analytics to identify high-traffic, low-converting landing pages and high-converting pages.

Go to the Behavior tab, then Landing Pages, and sort the URLs by the number of sessions. Click on the compare icon and choose the overall conversion rate. Once you’ve identified pages that have high traffic but low conversion rates, link internally from those pages with text, image, or banner links to high converting pages.

8. Do an Internal Link Audit of Your Website

An internal link audit will show you where you can solve existing internal link issues by helping you build on these elements to achieve game-changing results on your website. It is essential to understand what the common problems are and how you can solve them.

 Here are some of the most common dysfunctions in this regard: 

Broken internal links

Broken internal links send users and search engine spiders to non-existent web pages, which usually results in 404 errors. In this case, you can remove or replace the link with a link that points to a live page.

To find broken internal links on your domain, you can use Google Search Console. Google Search Console’s links feature helps you understand your site’s link profile by showing you link reports that include both external links, with top linking sites grouped separately, top anchor words on external sites, and the internal links report.

Go to Site Audit > Links > Broken Links and see if you have any. Filter the results by clicking on the HTTP status code, finding the broken page response (404 Not found), and filtering the link URL to find the same domain name for the link and the linked pages – that’s where your broken internal links are.

Links could not be crawled

If there is an error in the format of a URL, the links cannot be crawled. Check the links reported as errors and correct the formatting issues if necessary.

Maintain a reasonable number of links per page

The more internal links on a page, the less link juice each link sends to the page it points to. Placing too many links in your content, in addition to sending a spam signal to search engines and impacting your page’s authority, can annoy your visitors by forcing them to scroll through an endless list of resources. Try to reduce the number of internal links to send more authority to the pages you link to.

Check nofollow tags

Nofollow tags prevent search engines from distributing the link value from the linking page to the linked page. Therefore, it is advisable to remove nofollow tags.

Remove redirect chains

To make your internal links as strong as possible, check and correct redirect chains. A redirect chain can be problematic for SEO because the link equity will be diluted with each additional redirect that Google has to follow.

Check the alt attribute of image links

The alt attribute of image links works like anchor text for text links and sends a ranking signal to search engines and increases authority.

Conclusion

I hope this article has helped you understand what internal links are, why it’s important to have an optimized internal link structure, and that you’ve learned about eight internal linking strategies that can help you increase link value as well as improve your SEO. By considering the functions of different types of links and how they appear to users, you can make the most of your internal linking strategy. Remember, you have complete control over your website’s internal links, which makes them the easiest links to manage.

With a solid internal linking strategy, you can show search engines and your users which content is linking and which is the most informative and valuable. Take a look at your internal links, check your old content to make sure it has enough internal links. Once your site has a strong link architecture, it’s best to focus on creating useful and engaging content.