Internal Linking: Why It’s Important and How It Affects Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Internal linking is one of the most valuable SEO tactics you can use when optimizing your website for users and search engines.

After having done more than 300  technical SEO audits over the past two years, “smart” internal links are surprisingly one of the top 10 missed items.

From working in multiple verticals, we have seen website owners or internal teams can miss internal links due to:

• Poor website structure content planning.
• Lack of vision and understanding of site growth.
• Over-relying on out-of-the-box themes.
• Lack of internal resources to help automate or build the proper internal linking structures.

Here’s an example of strategic internal linking:

In our example, we use the term “Topic Cluster” to denote a main keyword or topic on a website with an informational slant. For retail sites, we would use the term “Category” instead of “Topic Cluster”.

What are Internal Links?

Internal links are hyperlinks that point to a different page on the same website domain.  When internal links are used correctly, they can greatly influence the following:

• Discovery.  Internal links make it easier for the search engines to crawl and find all of your pages.
• Relevance. Interlink your internal pages using thematic relationships.
• Navigation.  We want to make it easy for bots and humans to navigate a site.

How are Internal Links Structured?

Let’s break down a hyperlink using anchor text.  It looks like this:

<a href="https://www.domain.com/" title="Targeted Keyword" > Targeted Keyword</a>

To optimize your internal links so they support ongoing SEO and help humans and search bots crawl your site, use descriptive text, exact match, or partial match keywords for your anchor text.

For image-based internal links, you can have keywords in the alt text attribute.

For example, if you are linking to one of your service pages that offer “weight loss” services, you will want your anchor text to be one of the following: “weight loss” – “weight loss services” – “lose weight with our program” etc.

Why Internal Linking is Important and How Does it Affect Website Growth?

Here at PixelChefs, we start the SEO process before the first design element is implemented. From proper planning and workflow in each step of our wireframing to web development. We view SEO as the whole website experience, and internal links are an essential part of the website experience and our process.

Internal Linking For Better User Experience

Visitors rely on internal links to navigate from one page to the other. Without proper internal links, your website will consist of many dead-ends and/orphan pages that visitors can’t navigate..

To help with the user experience on your site, you will need to make sure your internal links allow your users to:

• Find similar or related content. (Helps with time on site)
• Navigate easier. (Knowing they can always come back will engage them to look further in your site)
• Find the right product, services, or content (Increases conversion and profitability)

Internal Linking For Search Engines

In addition to user experience, internal linking can affect SEO. Search engines similarly move around websites as visitors by visitors: they follow links. The difference is that search engines follow links automatically, whereas visitors follow them manually.

Search engines use web crawlers, known as bots, to follow links. All search engines have bots, which they use to crawl websites via links. While different technologies power them, they all crawl websites via links. When a bot lands on a page, it will follow links to other pages. The bot will continue this process by following the links on the new page and so forth.

Search engines can only index a page if they know it exists and can crawl it. With internal linking, you can guide them to your website’s pages which makes crawling your site easier and results in more indexed pages.

Building internal links to pages on your website can help them rank higher. A study conducted by SpyFu found a correlation between internal links and search rankings.

According to SpyFu, pages with many links from other pages on the same website domain rank higher than those with few or no links.

Internal links are the one place where you can reinforce your exact match keyword anchors, telling Google precisely what keyword you are trying to rank the page.  Some search engines will also value links more depending on the location of the links, making navigation links and primary content links much more valuable.

Internal Linking Best Practices

Here are four internal linking best practices you can follow:

1.  Link using the canonical version of your website’s URL

One of the biggest issues we see in our audits is internal links that are using the wrong format of the website’s declared URL. Make sure that all of your internal links are pointing to the canonical version of your URL.

• Always use the https version of your URL
• Use the declared version of your URL with or without WWW.
• Use the declared version of your URL with or without “/” at the end of the URL

The video below will show you how to find your URL’s declared (canonical) version quickly.

2.  Be sure to distribute the internal links

You’ll probably link to some pages on your website more than others. The homepage, for example, will likely receive the most links. To properly distribute your internal links, you will need to organize your content in groups and interlink them appropriately.  The more links a page gets, the more valuable it is perceived.  This is one of the main reasons new sites are only able to rank their home page.

Review your website’s performance data, such as monthly traffic, to find out which pages are the most popular. You can create relevant links from the top-performing pages to some of your new pages, potentially leading to faster crawling and driving more users to it.

3.  Don’t restrict internal links to navigation menus

A big mistake is depending only on navigational links to point to your internal pages, this can work great if you have a small site, but it will be tough to drive users and bots to all of your pages for larger sites. Some of my favorite ways to internal links are:

• Breadcrumbs
• Sidebar links
• Similar or related content/product feeds
• Footer links

4.  Avoid using the nofollow attribute with internal links

In the past, using internal links with a nofollow attribute was associated with a technique called page sculpting. This technique died a long time ago as search engines got smarter.

There’s no reason to use the nofollow tag with internal links. All internal links connect multiple pages on the same website domain. If you use the nofollow tag with them, you’ll essentially tell search engines that you don’t want that page to be crawled to index the website.

As the web competition grows in all verticals, you need to ensure that all of your pages are easily reached by users, crawled by search engines, and indexed right away. Learning how to interlink your site correctly will help you retain users and improve your website’s overall and SEO performance.