Internal Linking is Part of Your Link Building
If you are new to SEO or even a seasoned professional and you have never really dabbled with internal link building it is probably time for you start thinking about interlinking your pages and your posts to help with your long term SEO efforts. Interlinking is just as important for rankings as building external links so it is ideal that you start sooner rather than later. Internal linking offers a web user little portals to travel through to get to other important pages very quickly.
The whole goal of linking between pages is the ability to pass link juice to other pages of your website that could benefit greatly from it. Your natural website copy is littered with great potential areas to really increase the power of your internal website. Naturally the content of your website already has keywords throughout the text giving you great opportunities to link to some really nice and powerful anchor text throughout your website. When you link throughout your website to other pages always make sure you use beneficial keywords that you are already targeting in your ongoing search engine optimization efforts. Internal linking helps you balance out the power of your website quite a bit. Naturally over time certain pages of your website will build significantly more power than others so it is important to try and create a balance. Internal linking will allow you to drive extra power to other pages so that your website does not become top heavy with just a certain group of pages.
Scott Allen from Search Engine Guide had this to say about internal linking:
“When done right, contextual internal links also can help improve the usability of a site. By adding links to the content of your site that are relevant for the user, it provides another path to the destination you’re trying to lead them to. Multiple paths are a good thing in site navigation. Usability studies have shown that users are more likely to click on a link in the text of a page instead of those on a navigation bar, because it feels more natural.”
Internal linking gives a certain kind of support throughout your website to help strengthen pages that are already strong or help pages that are lagging behind. This approach can work very well once you really increase your page amount or have a blog connected to your URL. Get into the habit of linking between pages as you build your website or write in your blog and over time you will notice great results.
12 Responses to “Internal Linking is Part of Your Link Building”
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Hi Nick!
Enjoyed your article. Always learn something new or see from a different perspective.
Agree that website visitors will appreciate internal links with descriptive anchor text (as well as search engines).
And internal links to other, related posts on your site can help your readers find other interesting posts they may not have without your help. Good idea!
Thanks you. Take care.
Hi Ken,
Thanks for reading and your comment!
Really concentrating on the user and visitor experience with internal linking is always a best practice…thanks again for reading!
Your article is right on the money. I’m new to internet marketing and I’m finding out there is a lot to learn. it can also be very time consuming. After saying that, I’m also obsessed with learning and doing more. I’m looking for free options right now but soon I’ll be spending money to promote my websites. After all, it takes money to make money.
Hi Nick,
Excellent point about the fact that users are more likely to click contextual links than those in menus or graphics. As a result, your internal links are a great way to proactively steer visitors to parts of your website where you want them to go.
Take care,
Tom
Hi blogger4life,
Thanks for reading and your comment…you are certainly correct, it does take money to make money!
Hi Backlink Booster,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Internal links does help improve the user experience and can help improve an on site conversion as well!
Hi Nick. Great tips, as always.
I do a lot of internal linking because I know it will help my readers AND because it is a good way for me to keep good posts in circulation. In trying to learn SEO, I read a lot of stuff about internal linking that made it sound so dang confusing. Made it sound like it was an exact science and that you had to do it JUST SO or the world would come to an end. My little pea brain protested! So, as usual, I gave up on the “rules” and created my own system based on logic. I figured the search engines were ultimately looking for a good user experience. So I add the links when I know it will enhance my reader’s experience. There are lots of them because so many of my topics are related. I am not motivated by passing link juice but rather giving more info to my readers and keeping those posts in circulation so I do not have to rewrite on the same topic. I have faith that the search engines will understand and give me all the same rewards as the folks who are doing it by the complex formula. Hope my faith is not misguided. Seems to be working well.
Hi Lorranie,
As always thanks for reading and your comment!
Keeping this visitor focused and natural is always a great policy, especially with internal linking…
All along I thought having a menu bar linking to other pages is sufficient. This article has given me a second thought about the importance of internal linking and the benefits it brings over time. Thank you for a very good article, Nick.
I would like to see more articles on this topic as there aren’t many of them “out there”. Your advice is sound and can be trusted. Thanks for that! I have a little bar running on the right of my page with thumbnails of other products that relate to the main product of a particular page. You click on it, and it takes you to each product you click on, and when on that page, you click to get back. Would this be an example of “internal linking”?
Hi Barbara,
Thanks for reading and your comment.
I just looked at your website and an example of internal linking would be your left hand navigation with the anchor text links to a product category page. It looks like you have done a good job with your internal linking (naturally based on how the site was built). I do see many other areas of improvement though for your SEO though….
Thanks again for reading and I hope this helps!
Really helpful article, I keep plugging away learning small bits of useful information and I’m slowly climbing the rankings got to 2nd page now so I’m really chuffed.
Thanks for taking the time to help others.
Hi E O’Neill,
Thanks for reading! Best of luck with your SEO efforts and it is my pleasure to help people with their SEO