You may have heard of internal linking and wondered why it’s important and how to maximize its benefits in your SEO and website strategy. This blog post explains just that! Internal linking is important for several reasons. First, it helps search engines like Google navigate your site more easily, signaling that your website is well-structured, thoughtful, and valuable to users—which coincidentally is exactly what Google wants! Second, internal links keep users engaged on your site, encouraging them to explore more information, services, and products, which can lead to increased conversion and/or purchases.
Understanding Internal Links
What are Internal Links?
If you already know what internal links are, feel free to skip this section. However, if you want a refresher or want to learn about internal links, then stick around. Internal links are links you place inside your website that lead to other pages or posts on your website. Examples of this could be a button inside your homepage that leads to your services page, footer links, hyperlinked text, etc.
What are External Links?
Wait, what are external links then? While they are similar to internal links, the main difference is that external links are links inside your website that lead out to a different website. An example of this would be an SEO consultant website linking to SEMrush or Ahrefs to showcase what tools they use and/or to recommend these tools to people who may not have heard of them. These work great to build relationships with other companies and to provide your readers/customers with additional value and tools that you might not be able to offer at that time! They could also be used for affiliates and affiliate marketing to help you generate revenue by sending your users to a website where you get a portion of the revenue generated by your referrals.
Types of Internal Links
There are a few different types of internal links that you will commonly use and find on websites:
- Navigation Links: These are the links you find in headers and footers, e.g., Home, Services, Products, Resources, etc.
- Breadcrumbs: These are found near the top of the page under the header and commonly look something like Home > Service > Specific Service/Page.
- Image Links: These are links embedded inside of images.
- Contextual Links: These are the links you generally find inside of informational text that lead to related resources (e.g., you can find more information on this here).
- Footer Links: These are found at the very bottom of a website page (e.g., scroll down and click).
Understanding the various types of links and internal links makes it easier to build a site that allows ease of use, rapid crawling for Google, and other amazing benefits. From improving navigation to boosting your search engine optimization, internal links are essential in the website development community!
Internal Links and SEO
Enhancing Crawlability
You might be wondering how internal linking helps your SEO. It’s actually quite simple. When Google and other search engines crawl the internet, they use little bots that go from page to page downloading content, mostly through the links on your website. Much like a person trying to see every page on your site, these bots follow your internal links. So, if you have an easy-to-follow link hierarchy and plenty of links on each page, it makes crawling easier. This shows Google that your website has a good user interface, making it easier for users to find the information they need. This, in turn, boosts your search rankings and SEO efforts.
Distributing Page Authority
Internal links also help to transfer page authority. One example of this would be if a high-performing Apple.com page linked to a low-performing page. When you link pages, it transfers some authority from your page, which helps tell Google that you endorse that page and that it’s useful to users. Needless to say, it boosts your search engine optimization rankings on the page you internally linked to.
How Many Internal Links Should You Have?
While there’s no set-in-stone answer, it is generally good practice to include as many useful internal links as necessary to provide the resources your users are looking for. This could include around 3-10 internal links per page. This avoids cluttering users with too many links while still having enough resources for them to keep exploring and answering their questions.
Balancing User Experience and SEO
When adding internal links, you should always prioritize your customers/visitors. It doesn’t matter how good your SEO is if your users don’t interact or engage with your content. However, that doesn’t mean linking can’t also help your UX. Users do expect and use links that lead to important and relevant information. One great example of using internal links to improve SEO and user experience would be linking a blog talking about how to train a dog to a new blog page about different types of tricks you could teach a dog. This would transfer over link authority to a new and important page while also directing users to a page that would genuinely provide value and use to them.
Internal Linking Best Practices
Planning Your Internal Linking Strategy
Setting up a linking, cornerstone, and hierarchy strategy/map is a great way to maximize the benefits of your website and content structure. A good approach ensures that link authority is spread out and used effectively, that important pages receive the attention they deserve, and that users can find all the content they want while enhancing the SEO experience. One simple way to get started with creating a linking strategy is to grab a list of all your content pieces and/or relevant and important pages that your website has currently, and/or plans to make, and then rank them from highest importance to lowest and categorize them. Then build a mind map/ladder of importance for your linking.
Tools for Planning and Analyzing Internal Links
There are many tools online to help with linking. Here at Big Red Jelly, we use tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, but there are a multitude out there. These tools provide different functions, from testing links and page authority to checking your SEO rankings, what queries you’re ranking for on Google, checking for broken links, and analyzing your linking structure. Using these tools ensures that your internal linking is up to par with your strategy and goals!
Setting Goals and Measuring Success
Before setting up a plan of action for your linking strategy, you should review what you hope to gain from your internal linking. Are you trying to boost poor-performing pages? Reduce bounce rates? Increase the time your users spend on your site? Or are you trying to drive sales faster? All of these goals will lead to slightly different internal links, hyperlinks, buttons, pages you link to, content you offer, and user flow, so you should make sure to adjust your strategy to whatever goals you decide on!
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Overfilling content with too many internal links (looks spammy)
- Using boring and generic anchor text like “click here” (not descriptive)
- Ignoring pages with no internal links (orphan pages)
- Not linking to relevant, valuable content (missed conversions and page authority)
- Failing to regularly audit links (outdated links)
- Linking just for SEO (poor user experience)
Tips for Continuous Improvement
Internal linking is not a one-time task. You should pay close attention to it and take a couple of minutes on each new piece of website content to go through and link to anything relevant you can find in your content base. You should also regularly review and adjust your links as your needs change and test what works best in a changing world.
Internal linking is an effective tactic for your website design and user experience when done right and planned strategically with both user experience and search engine optimization in mind. Some key things to remember as you go on your internal linking journey:
- Internal linking is crucial for both SEO and user experience.
- Use a variety of link types (navigation, breadcrumbs, contextual) for better site structure.
- Aim for 3-10 internal links per page to avoid clutter and enhance usability.
- Regularly audit your website to address orphan pages and outdated links.
- Ensure anchor text is descriptive and relevant to the linked content.
- Plan a strategic internal linking approach to distribute page authority effectively.
Written by Brody Cook.
