You already know that backlinks are crucial for the success of your SEO efforts. But do you know that internal links are equally important? If not, you are not alone.
Most SEOs and website owners focus more on backlinks and ignore internal links. This is a huge mistake that can hurt your SEO efforts. As a reputable SEO agency, we have learned a lot about developing a winning SEO strategy to get the best results. And we can say without a shred of doubt that internal linking is a powerful lever that can bring excellent results when used strategically. This post looks at everything you need to know about internal linking and SEO.
Understanding Internal Links
An internal link is a link that points from one page to another on your site. Users and search engines use links to find content on your website. More specifically, both users and search engines use links to navigate your site to find the content they are searching for.
Internal links are similar to backlinks—and you know that backlinks play a critical role in SEO. Typically, internal links help create a hierarchy of all your website pages. The pages you link to most are viewed as a higher priority, and Google’s algorithms will give them more link equity.
Internal Links Vs. External Links Vs. Backlinks
Internal links and backlinks are both types of hyperlinks—they come with an anchor text, href attribute, and rel attribute (in some cases). However, each provides value in unique ways.
As you have seen earlier, internal linking involves creating a link from one page to another page on your site. Internal links will not boost your website’s authority but funnel the existing authority from your backlinks to your entire website.
On the other hand, backlinks are hyperlinks between two pages on different websites. Backlinks provide an excellent way to boost your website authority and improve rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). You can think of them as votes for your website.
Lastly, external links are hyperlinks from your website to a different domain. These are ideal when citing a source or linking to more in-depth content regarding a topic you are covering.
What Does Google Say About Internal Links?
Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that internal links are crucial for SEO. Mueller confirmed this during one of the office hour sessions when a participant asked whether enabling breadcrumbs is enough for internal linking.
According to John, internal linking is ‘supercritical for SEO’ and is among the critical elements that users and Googlebot use to understand how important a page is within a website. He stated that internal links offer an excellent way to mark the essential pages within a website to ensure users and Google are guided in the right direction.
According to John, web admins need to adopt a strategic internal linking strategy—you need to use appropriate anchor text when creating internal links to make it possible for users and Google to understand the context.
Why Internal Links are Important for SEO
Google uses links to understand website content and decide where to rank this content in search results. Google views a page with lots of links (both internal and external links) as a high-value article. That said, here are the reasons why internal links are essential for SEO:
Help Search Engines Understand Your Site Structure
One of the benefits of internal linking is that it allows Google and other search engines to find and index pages on your website.
Internal links provide an excellent opportunity for Google to discover content on your site. Besides, internal linking helps users and Google understand the contextual relationship between two pages.
When you create an internal link from page A to page B, you send signals that those are related. This way, users and search engines will know that the content from the two pages is connected and can make a connection.
Easy Navigation
As users go through your content, they will have more questions. You need to anticipate these questions and guide their thought process.
Internal link building will enable you to deliver a good user experience when moving your potential customers into your conversion funnel. You can then add internal links strategically to encourage them to take action.
Providing your users with a premium user experience means they will stay longer on your site instead of going back to Google for answers. This helps build brand trust, awareness, and loyalty and ultimately boosts sales.
Pass Your Page’s Authority
As we mentioned earlier, internal linking helps Google identify which pages of your site are more important. With the right internal linking strategy, internal links can pass link juice and ultimately improve rankings.
PageRank (PR) algorithm assesses and determines the quality and importance of individual pages on your website (while considering internal linking) and applying a value to it.
Although Google removed the PageRank Toolbar in 2016, it is still part of the ranking algorithm, meaning you need to understand how it works to create an effective internal linking strategy. For example, a page with authoritative external links will have a higher PageRank score. You can pass this authority to another page via internal links.
The catch is to identify these authoritative pages and take advantage of the authority on your site to improve rankings.
Internal Links Give Context
Google needs context to understand your web pages and search queries. URLs, H1tags, page titles, subheadings, and other on-page elements give search engines context about a page.
Internal links, too, provide search engines with context. This does not just involve the anchor text that you link to. The paragraph, subheading, and the link’s context within the sentence will also help search engines and users understand more about the link.
Internal Links Help Search Engines Crawl Your Site
Google uses links to discover new content. Google and other search engines could take longer to find a URL if it does not contain any internal links or backlinks.
Web crawlers and Googlebot travel from one link to another. If a new page has more links, the easier Google will find it. Pages on your site without any links are known as orphaned. Always ensure that the crucial pages on your site contain at least one link.
Types of Internal Links
Links are classified depending on their purpose and characteristics. Internal links are classified into two main categories: Navigational and Contextual links.
Navigational Links
These internal links make up the main navigational structure of a website. Typically, navigational links are site-wide links that help users find what they want in a website. They come in the form of text or picture icons and with proper HTML formatting. The primary purpose of navigational links is to build effective navigation to boost conversions.
Contextual Links
A contextual link refers to a clickable text within the written content of your webpage. When done right, contextual linking can become a strong SEO strategy for your site. Besides, contextual linking helps build credibility and popularity among users and search engines.
In other words, contextual links point to related articles and topics to ensure your pages are better linked internally and users stay longer on your site. This will ultimately reduce bounce rate and improve user engagement.
Other types of internal links worth mentioning include:
Bookmarks
These internal links refer to a specific section of a particular page or anchors. Bookmarks make navigation around bulky pages and switching between the content and referred section easier. They are implemented with the help of <a href=”#anchorname”> link in your HTML.
Breadcrumbs
You may not need breadcrumbs if your site architecture is pretty simple. However, you will need them if you run an eCommerce site with several product pages.
If you are not aware, breadcrumbs are a simple navigational feature at the top of a page that illustrates your website hierarchy. Their main purpose is to improve user experience (UX) as it allows users to go back to any point in the content hierarchy. They also help search engines understand how your content is organized and the crucial sections of your site.
Additionally, breadcrumbs pass along valuable backlink juice. The best part is that you can automate them once you create them on your website to avoid repetitive work.
CTAs and Sidebar Links
Sidebar links are a type of navigational links—think about a list of categories or related content and CTA modules that are more commercially focused, meaning they have little PageRank.
You can use sidebar links to improve user experience and crawlability. To achieve this, create a sidebar module and link to similar content. For instance, you can choose top pages within the same category or select URLs manually from a topic cluster. You may also decide to link to deep pages that do not naturally match your body content.
Nofollow Links
Typically, some links on your website are not important for SEO. For instance, a login page for your clients on your homepage doesn’t need to rank higher in search results and does not need link value.
A nofollow tag tells Google not to follow a less valuable link to prevent losing link value. While this worked in the past, the case is now different as Google has since changed how it views nofollow links.
The link value for nofollow links does not necessarily flow to other page links. The nofollow link is viewed as a link, and the value for that link is not lost. Thus, it is best to limit the number of links on a page than nofollow some of the links.
Ideally, adding a nofollow tag will not prevent Google from finding those pages. If you do not want specific pages to appear in search results, give them a noindex tag.
Footer Links
Footer links do not add any authority to your website. Footers with several links will appear spammy. The best approach? Link to your Privacy page, Contact page, and About Us page to help with navigation.
Internal Links Best Practices
Now that you know why internal linking is important for your SEO strategy, let’s look at best practices you can follow for your website.
Integrate SEO When Creating Content
You need internal pages with lots of quality content to get many internal links on your site. After all, how will you build a robust internal linking structure if you don’t have lots of content on your website?
But creating lots of content is not enough; you need to integrate SEO into your content strategy. Without keeping SEO top of mind when creating your content strategy, you won’t have ideal content for internal linking. Consider your personas, their challenges, and their path to conversion.
Understanding your customer’s pain points will go a long way in helping identify the terms they are searching in Google and their intent. Ultimately, this helps understand how you should present your content.
As a rule of thumb, create content that aligns with your customer’s pain points and anticipate their questions through their buying funnel.
Have an Easy-to-Use Website Structure
It is always a good practice to have a shallow website structure—where each content can be reached within three clicks from the homepage. Today, users care much about website speed, including the page load time and how soon it takes to complete specific actions.
If a user has to get through unnecessary links to get to their destination, they will head to another similar website with efficient internal pages. Minimize the number of clicks users need to get to important landing pages and have a simple website structure.
Use Topic Clusters
Topic clusters are crucial for your internal linking strategy. Topic clusters refer to a related bunch of content that covers broad concepts. It involves having one pillar content for each group and supporting cluster pages.
But why are topic clusters important for an effective internal linking strategy? They form a group of relevant content, with each pillar page covering an important topic with various subtopics.
These pillar pages then link to complex blog posts from appropriate subheadings from these subtopics. They form the cluster pages that link back to the main page. You can also link these cluster pages to each other and even other pillar pages where appropriate.
Topic clusters make Google view you as an authority and expert in a given topic. They also make your content organized into small su