When you click on a link on a webpage, and it takes you somewhere else on the same website or domain, that’s an internal link.
Users are able to effortlessly move about a website with these links. If you want to boost your website’s search engine optimization, you need to implement best practises for internal linking.
Check out what Evan Hall, SEO Architect at Portent, had to say about internal links in this episode of the SEO On-Air Podcast before we go into the nitty-gritty.
The Value of Internal Connecting Practice
Google’s crawlers follow both internal and external links when exploring a website. When the bot gets to a website, it starts at the homepage and follows the first link it finds. By exploring these connections, it learns how various pages on a website are related to one another. Google does more than just analyse the connections between websites; it also allocates a link’s value proportionally among all of the hyperlinks on a given page.
Why do we need Link Juice?
In search engine optimization (SEO), the concept of “link juice” is employed broadly. It describes the beneficial effects of a website’s linkages to other websites. As we’ve already established, search engines like Google see links as votes of confidence in the quality and credibility of your website cast by other websites. There are several methods for building links, but they can all be broken down into two main groups: internal linking and external linking.
Several Positives of Using Internal Links
By now, you should be familiar with how site architecture and link juice are distributed with the use of internal links. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of using best practises for internal links:
Websites with a well-thought-out system of internal links are far more user-friendly. Anchor links allow you to guide readers to other pages within your site that they will find interesting and useful. When visitors to your site see that the information they’re looking at on several pages is connected, they’re more likely to stick around.
Your site’s bounce rate can also be lowered by utilising internal links. People are less likely to finish reading an article on your site if they deem it boring or irrelevant. In order to lower the bounce rate, it is important to optimise the content with relevant internal links. If your website’s bounce rate decreases, so will its overall rating.
If you structure your site correctly, Google’s bots will be able to crawl all the way to your rarely-visited internal pages. This is because they will naturally follow the links and pages that are easiest to index. The increased visibility of linked pages and the website as a whole can benefit from this practise.
Just what is an Internal Connecting Structure?
Most websites follow a very standard format, with a homepage that serves as the hub for several levels of navigation. Still, the structure of certain websites is more convoluted than that of others.
Webmasters used to employ the silo method to boost keyword prominence inside a specific category. There’s no need to overcomplicate things with an approach to creating inbound links within your own site.
Internal linking hierarchy
You already know that internal links help develop your website structure and make it easy for users to traverse the site by establishing a hierarchy of content. Users will be more likely to explore your site and read more of its content if doing so is simple.
With the right approach to internal linking, you can direct traffic to pages that are more likely to convert into customers and boost your bottom line. The longer time people spend on your site and the more pages they visit, the more positive signal you send Google about the quality of your content, and the further up in the rankings you’ll go.
Best Internal Linking Practices You Need To Follow in 2023
Now that you understand why good practises for internal linking are so crucial for every website, let’s look at some specific guidelines you can use to construct your own site’s internal linking infrastructure.
Produce a Great Deal of Material
Building a robust network of inbound connections requires an abundance of both internal pages and high-quality content. In order to establish a solid internal linking structure on your website, you need not worry about complex layers of content or the silo technique if you have a lot of information already.
Connect New Pages to High Authority Ones to Boost Search Engine Positions
Link authority is sent to the most important SEO-driven pages of a website using the Authority Transfer methodology, which is an important and successful strategy. Finding these pages and linking to them within can be done with the help of powerful tools like Ahrefs.
Make your target keyword(s) the anchor text
Images should not be linked directly but rather linked via anchor words so that the internal linking theme of the material is maintained. Make sure the alt tags accurately describe each image before you link to it. Avoid making your anchor texts look spammy by using natural, unoptimized sentence fragments.
In-Depth Connections
Two specific varieties of internal linkages should be avoided at all costs. Linking to your site’s homepage is step one. Your homepage will likely already have a lot of inbound links, so instead of building more inbound connections to it, you should work on strengthening internal sites by interlinking them.