Did you know internal links can improve SEO rankings? They are essential for building authority, traffic, and conversions. Learn why they matter and how to create them.

What are internal links? The term ‘internal link’ refers to linking from within your site or blog to another page. This means you have created a backlink between pages on the same domain. These links often appear under ‘links’ on your site navigation bar. This article discusses the importance of internal links to your content and SEO strategy.

What Are Internal Links

An internal link points to another page or section within the same website. It’s different from an external link because it doesn’t point to an entirely separate URL. For example, you want to share your favorite article about SEO. In that case, you can write an article titled “Content for SEO” and then include different types of links pointing back to other pages where people might be interested in learning more about this topic. This is good practice for any website with lots of content; it helps visitors find exactly what they’re looking for while also boosting their rankings.

Why Are Internal Links Important?

Internal linking is an essential part of building a strong online presence. You want visitors to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. In addition to helping people navigate your site, internal links help search engines understand how relevant each piece of content is. They also tell Google about related topics and descriptive keywords.

For Search Engines

Why does Google care about links? Links are one way Google discovers content on your site. When someone shares a link to another page on your site, Google sees this as a sign that there might be something useful on that page. So, if you’ve got lots of footer links pointing to specific posts and pages on your site, Google knows those pages are worth exploring.

Builds Trust

When people see that you’re linking to another part of your site, they know you think highly enough of that blog content to include it within your own. This builds trust with visitors, which leads to increased conversions.

Improves Readability

People like to skim articles, especially when they’re busy. So when you make it easy for readers to scan your content, they’re less likely to skip over anything important.

For Indexing

If your website has a good internal linking structure, then Google search crawlers can crawl through and index its pages easily. In addition, Google’s search engine bots regularly crawl the web looking for fresh content. So if you consistently publish high-quality content, the chances are good that your content will show up in searches sooner rather than later.

For Authority

Google uses links to determine whether a web page is authoritative. Authoritative sites tend to have more footer links pointing to them because they offer quality information. Internal link building helps improve page ranking and pass authority (Page Rank) to other pages within the same domain. If you link from one page to another, both pages are given credit for having the same authority. This means that the link authority of each page increases, and the overall link authority of your entire site rises.

For Navigation

Internal links are frequently included in Web pages’ main navigation so visitors can quickly and easily visit related content. They’re often found at the bottom of each webpage and link to other pages on your site. Internal links improve navigation because they help users quickly find pages and signal how well you organize your site to Google. Including internal links within your website’s main navigation can help improve user engagement and increase conversion rates.

It’s the Connection to Power Your Website

Backlinks are like the wires that connect your home to the electrical grid. They’re the foundation of your site’s structure. Without them, you wouldn’t have electricity. You might have plenty of wires, but you will only ever see the light if you’ve got a bunch of dead ends.

It’s important to ensure that your website has enough internal links to keep visitors moving around the house. Broken links are like cutting a wire or tripping a breaker; they stop traffic from flowing smoothly.

In the same way, more than having lots of reciprocal links are needed to ensure that people will find your site. Sometimes, you might have lots of links, but people will only know about your site if they come across it. And sometimes, you might have very few backlinks, but those few backlinks could help someone find what they’re looking for.

For A Great Internal Structure

Internal links are like an organizational chart for your website – they assist visitors in getting from one page to another without leaving your site. In addition, they provide related pages and subcategorizations. For example, they may divide their blog into “Lifestyle” and a “Technology” categories. This reinforces context, relevance, depth, and breadth of coverage on a topic while helping users navigate your site.

For Content Hierarchy

Google considers websites with lots of natural links (inbound links) more important than sites with few links from within their site. This is called “content hierarchy.” So if you’re trying to rank highly in Google, make sure your pages are linked to other pages within your site.

For Link Juice

Internal linking helps to spread link juice (the ranking power) around websites. When you publish a new page or resource, it’s important to strategically place internal links to that page. These links are like breadcrumbs—they help search engines crawl and index your site better. They also improve page indexing by transferring link juice (ranking strength). Therefore, they help newer sites get indexed faster.

For Lower Bounce Rates

If your website has an 80% bounce rate, meaning that 80 percent of visitors leave after visiting only one web page, it might be because your site needs to be optimized more. Unfortunately, this means you have a poor user experience.

In fact, according to Moz, a low bounce rate indicates that your site isn’t providing value to your audience.

By interlinking pages on the same domain, you can encourage visitors to stay longer on your site and keep coming back. In addition, a small piece of code (included on every page) will send strong signals to search engines and may improve your ranking potential.

Have More Pageviews

Internal linking helps to decrease bounce rates and increase page views. Internal links connect related web pages within a single webpage. They are also known as interlinking because they link different parts of a website together.

Internal linking lets people stay on the same page but go to another part of the same site without leaving the current page. This allows visitors to explore additional information about a topic or product without opening multiple tabs.

Not only does internal link building help improve your site’s ranking, but it can also boost traffic and increase overall engagement. This is because visitors spend more time on pages with more internal links.

Shows What Are the High-Performing

The best way to improve conversions is to guide visitors to the pages where they are most likely to convert. If you want to do this, you must know what pages on your site generate the most visits and how many of those visitors end up buying something. In addition, you must know which pages on your site have the highest conversion rates because these are the most worth promoting.

Improve Authority of Deep Content Pages

Inbound links are still one of the best ways to improve your site traffic. But there’s another way to earn those reciprocal links—deep linking. This link building strategy involves creating unique content on your site that no one else has ever published. It’s called deep linking because it goes deeper into your site than just the homepage.

Internal Links Are Necessary for a Successful SEO Campaign

You must add relevant links to your website to rank well in search engines. Internal links are those that connect different parts of your website. They’re also useful to provide context to your readers.

How Do Internal Links Differ from External Links and Backlinks

When building link equity, you can use three main categories of links: internal, external, and backlinks. Each type of link provides a unique benefit.

Internal Links

Internal links are links within your site. For example, if you’re writing about how to make money online, you might include a blog post titled “How To Make Money Online.” This is an internal link. You could also write a blog post, “The Best Ways To Make Money Online,” which contains a list of resources.

External Links

External links are links outside of your site. For example, you should link to a hotel review site if you run a travel blog. This is an external link. External links are useful for getting traffic to your site since people often follow links to learn more information.

Backlinks

It is a link pointing to your site from another site. Backlinks are important because they help improve your domain authority and SEO. Domain authority(DA) measures how authoritative a particular domain name is based on the number of incoming links it receives. A high DA indicates that others trust the domain name.

How to Create a Successful Internal Linking Strategy

Be Clear about Your Site Structure

The most important thing about creating a good website structure is determining what type of information you want to provide visitors. This includes deciding whether to focus on providing general information, specific products, or both. You might think that you could place everything under one big category, but that won’t work because people prefer to scroll through long lists. Instead, it would help if you tried to group similar items into different categories. For example, if you sell clothing, you probably would need to include shoes and accessories in a different section.

Determine Your Best Article

It would help if you determined what relevant content is most important to your brand. This is called “cornerstone content.” Cornerstone content represents your brand, and it’s the content you want people to find whenever they search for topics related to your industry.

If you need to know your cornerstone content, ask yourself questions like: What do I offer my audience? How does my product/service help my potential customers solve problems? Who am I trying to reach? Where do they hang out online?

Once you’ve determined your cornerstone content, you’ll need to figure out how to make it stick out among the rest of your content. For example, you can use long-tail keywords in your descriptive anchor text, write great headlines, and include images and videos.

Know Where to Place Your Links

Decide where you want to place your links. Do you want to put them in the body copy or outside the main body? Should you use internal or external linking? These decisions will depend on whether you want to rank for specific terms or improve your rankings.

Link Parent Pages to Child Pages

Hierarchical pages are those that contain subcategories or sections within themselves. They’re great because they help organize information into logical categories. For example, let’s say you sell me’s shoes online. You might have a category called “Men’s Shoes,” and inside it, you could have subcategories such as “Italian Shoes.” This helps people find what they want much faster.

If you have hierarchical pages on a website, link parent pages (the ones that lead to another level of hierarchy) to their child pages (those that lead to another level). And vice versa. This helps visitors navigate your site better, making it easier for search crawlers to index it.

Add a Related Post Portion

Related posts are great because they allow visitors to explore your site without having to go directly to it. They also provide a nice opportunity to include additional information that might interest readers, like a video or image.

Have Navigational Links

Besides adding link buttons directly from topical, relevant posts and pages, you may also consider linking to your cornerstone articles (which provide value) from some of your best posts and pages. This gives those posts or high-converting pages a lot more authority because they’re linked directly from one of the vital sections of your site.

For example, instead of optimizing every page of your site at once, focus on one or two posts on each page. These posts or pages will already be strong enough to rank well organically, but now they’ll look even better, thanks to some extra informative links.

What Are Internal Links: Commonly Asked Questions

Can You Rank Using Links Added to Forms?

Forms usually involve elements as simple as a drop-down box or as complex as a full-blown form. Unfortunately, search engine spiders won’t attempt to submit form submissions, so any links or contents within those form submissions are invisible to the spider, meaning they’re useless for search engine rankings or building organic search results.

However, there are ways around this problem. One way is to add rel “nofollow” tags to links within the form. This tells the search engines that it is okay to follow the link because it does not pass PageRank. Another option is to place the form on a separate domain and redirect visitors to the main site.

Is It Relevant to Put Links on Internal Search Boxes?

Google recently announced that it plans to stop crawling some sites entirely. This move is part of the company’s efforts to improve the quality of search results. In addition to hiding certain pages behind internal search boxes, Google will no longer crawl those pages. As a result, millions of pages are now inaccessible to search engines.

Can Google Crawl Links Be Created Using Javascript?

Javascript is often used to build links within web pages. This allows you to add functionality to your site without writing any additional code. However, there are some problems with this approach. Firstly, search engines can’t index the link text. Secondly, the link itself may be considered spammy by search engines. Finally, the link may be removed from the index altogether.

The solution is simple – use standard HTML links instead of javascript based ones.

What to Do If You Use Plug-in Technologies for Link Building?

Flash, Java, Silverlight, and other plugins often contain links that aren’t visible to search engines. This makes it difficult for search engines to index those additional links and provide relevant information about the site. However, there are ways to ensure these links are still accessible to search engines.

The most common way to fix this problem is to use relnofollow. However, the nofollow links won’t pass PageRank to the linked page when you do this. In addition, you must add noindex tags to the page’s HTML code containing the link. This tells search engines not to crawl the page.

Does Having Too Many Links on a Page Affect Crawling?

All the major Internet browsers (such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) have a maximum number of contextual links allowed within a certain size of time (150 links per page).

If you have hundreds or thousands of links on one page, consider breaking them into separate pages to avoid exceeding this limit. For example, you could use 301 redirects to move the link juice from the old to the new page. Alternatively, consider creating a microsite or landing page for each site section.

What’s the Connection between Internal Links and Google Ranking Factors

GSearcoogle recently acknowledged internal links (links within another page) are part of its algorithm for determining how they rank websites in their search results.

This guide explains how to improve rankings for link target keywords within your site. In addition to providing tips on creating great content, Google advises against building too many internal links. Instead, they state: “Create a naturally flowing hierarchy.”

Google advises adding navigation pages when it makes good sense and effectively works into your crawlable link structure and ensuring all pages are reachable through contextual links. However, they also mention that you should only build a few internal links because it could confuse users.

To End

Understanding what internal links are is one of the best modes to increase the number of pages indexed by Google. But it’s easy to overlook this crucial step in building a strong site architecture. Have you encountered issues with your SEO campaigns? ITD Webdesign is here to help. Connect with us to know how we can help you.