What Are Internal Links? Internal Link Strategy for SEO

What Are Internal Links?

In order for web pages to function effectively, they have to be able to communicate with one another and allow for users to easily make their way between different web pages on a website. So what is an internal link and why is it such an important part of SEO? If a user clicks on a link on a web page and is taken to another, you are clicking on an internal link! These kinds of links are extremely important, and without them, users and search engine crawlers will not be able to make sense of your website and will struggle to make sense of both the content on your page, lowering the quality of the website and the overall user experience. Search engines are all about ease of use and providing the best structured and easily navigated websites to their users. Ensuring that your internal links are each in working order and can quickly take visitors on your website to different internally linked pages is vital to the success of your website and the overall user experience. 

What Are The Differences Between Internal Links and External Links?

While internal links are responsible for leading users through your website, navigating from one web page to another, external links, or inbound links, take users from another website to your own. External links are important as they can improve the quality and authority of your website, as long as you are getting these links from high quality and authoritative websites. While external links are not imperative to the functioning of your website, they do improve your SEO and find relevant pages that can link back to your own. While external links are not necessary to the functioning of web pages, internal links are and ensuring that your users can make their way through the various web pages on your website is important. 

Why Do Internal Links Matter For Google?

Internal links are not just important for users to make their way through your website but they are also how search engine crawlers index your page and rank them for queries that are searched on search engine results pages. Google needs to be able to understand the structure of your website to ensure that it has all the necessary data to rank it on search engine results pages, and ensuring that it is as easy as possible for search engine crawlers to make their way through your website means having a good internal linking system and higher rankings. 

Another reason why internal links are important when it comes to Google is that Google is a search engine that prioritises its users and the experience that they would have on your web page is an important ranking factor to consider. If Google finds that your internal links are irrelevant and not as impactful as they could be, your SEO may be negatively impacted and your rankings on search engine results pages would be lower as opposed to if your internal links are relative and well structured! Having irrelevant links on web pages that are not leading to pages and information that could help users is seen as harmful to the quality of your website and the content, so be sure to include only relevant internal links! 

What are the Benefits of an Internal Linking Strategy?

Improves User Experience

To easily make their way through your website, your users will have to use your internal linking system to navigate through the various pages you may have. To improve the user experience even further, it is important to note that internal links should connect to relevant pages, with information following on in a structured way! Doing this will ensure that your users are not only able to easily navigate through your various pages but that they will be able to find information that is relative to what they are looking for! When it comes to this, understanding and gaining insight into user and search intent is an incredibly important part of this process! With a well-structured linking system, you are sure to greatly improve the experiences that a user has with your website and the content on it! 

Search Engines Use Links To Crawl Your Site

In order to index your website, search engine crawlers need to be able to make their way through your website easily, and they do this by following on through the different linking systems that you have on your webpage. Search engine crawlers make their way through your website like any user would, gaining insight and understanding of what your content is about through looking at the different internal links you have and where they lead. Having a well-structured linking system will only improve the quality of your webpage, ensuring that you gain a higher authority! 

What Should You Do To Improve Your Internal Link Strategy?

As internal links are such a vital aspect of SEO, it is important that you improve your internal link strategies as your website grows and develops. Through maintaining certain tactics and devising plans to promote your most popular pages through internal links, you can be sure that both users and search engines will have a good idea of which information and content are most important to note. The following are just a few ways that you can work to improve your internal link strategy. 

Determine The Ideal Structure For Your Website

Planning out your website properly and having a structure that you can follow will make it easier for both search engines and users to navigate through your website! Websites that do not have a proper and well-thought-out structure may find that users associate their website as one that is confusing, therefore hindering the user experience and lowering your chances of ranking highly on search engine results pages. Having a set and specific structure that is composed to highlight certain internal links on certain pages will ensure that user intent and understanding of the consumer is threaded through your internal link strategy. 

Decide What Your Most Important Content is

Having a good idea of what your most important and relevant content is on your webpage is a great way to improve your internal link strategy. Knowing what data and content will be most useful to those who visit your web page will ensure that the way you structure your content will filter down from this information. This kind of content is often broad, giving your users a good idea of who you are and how you can help them with their needs! Structuring your content in this way and leading back to this vital information is a great filtering system and will ensure that users who visit your website have a good idea of who you are, what you do and how your brand or business can best help them achieve their goals or desires! 

Add Links to Popular or Recent Posts

In order to maintain a good flow and ensure that your newer content is getting noticed, it is important to add links to popular and recent pages on your website! Newer pages may not be getting high ranks at first and so using your older and higher ranked content to gain the attention to your newer data will help it to rise through the ranks at a much faster pace, as Google and other search engines will note that users are enjoying the content that you are producing! 

What are The Best Practices of Internal Links?

Integrate SEO into your content strategy

SEO is an extremely important part of any marketing plan, and ensuring that you have all the tools and knowledge within your content strategy will ensure you are far more likely to succeed and achieve your goals. Through integrating your SEO plans within your content strategy, you can ensure that your content is properly optimised and more likely to rank better on search engine results pages! Without including SEO elements within your content strategy, you will not gain the momentum and organic traffic that is needed to be successful, and without clearly defined SEO goals and metrics, you may be unsure of why your content is not doing well and not have the know-how to change it. Through integrating your SEO and linking plans within your content strategy, you can gain better insight into your metrics and have the ability to adjust certain elements if they are not working for your brand or business. 

Use Keyword-Rich Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the words that you click on to take you to another web page on your website. Having relevant and keyword specific internal links will ensure that the content you are linking together through your web pages is relevant. Keyword-rich anchor text also ensures that you are optimising your content to appear within certain searches, increasing the amount of high-quality organic traffic that will be streamed through your site. 

Link to Important Pages

Having internal links that connect to the most important and relevant pages on your website will help to increase the amount of traffic that stays on your website and moves through it. Funnelling the different content on your page in such a way that a user will always be able to find relevant and interesting topics and points of interest ensures that they have a good experience with your website and the web pages that they visit on it! By making sure that the majority of your links are pointing towards these relevant pages, you can ensure that Google and other search engines are aware of which pages you want to appear on search results more often. 

Don’t Use the Same Anchor Text for Different Pages

While some of the content you are producing may be very similar, your internal anchor text links that are responsible for linking your web pages together should never be the same. Having the same anchor texts that each lead to different pages can be highly confusing for both the user and the search engines indexing your webpage, and so it is important to avoid doing this when creating anchor text links. 

Audit Internal Links With the Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an extremely handy SEO tool that can help a great deal when it comes to optimising your internal links. Properly auditing your links using the Google Search Console tool provides you with a ton of useful information that can help you to better structure and organise your page. One of the most notable features that Google Search Console offers is providing information on which links are the most commonly used and popular, as this is what search engines like Google use when ranking your web page on search engine results pages. 

What are The Effects of Internal Links On SEO?

The importance of links in SEO should never be underestimated and they can have a profound impact on how your website is optimised! One of the biggest ways that internal links impact your SEO is that they let search engines know which are your most important pages, ensuring that they know which pages to rank on search engine results pages. The more internal links you have directing traffic to specific pages, the more likely a search engine is going to take note of that specific page and mark it as important. As search engines become smarter and better at noticing the quality of content and how the data matches up with user intent, the more you need to pay attention to things like internal links. Having relevant and effective internal linking systems can greatly improve your chances of ranking highly and improve your website SEO features. 

What Are Examples of Internal Links?

One of the easiest ways to explain what an internal link looks like and how it functions is to think of an example. When you type a query into Google and a link to a website pops up that looks like something that would interest you, you click on it and it will take you to the page of the website that has specific information. On this page, you will find all relevant information, but you may find that the website holds more pages that interest you and are relative to what you are searching for. You will then click on an internal link that will take you to the following page. This is why it is important to have relevant internal links on your web pages! 

How Can You Analyse Your Websites’ Internal Links?

There are several different SEO tools that can help you to monitor the quality of your internal links, ensuring that they are both relevant and quick to respond. With search engines like Google becoming more concerned with the quality of content and relevance to users, using these tools to your advantage is becoming more important than ever! One of the best tools to use when it comes to internal links is an internal linking audit tool. So what is an internal linking audit and how can it help improve the quality of your linking systems? An internal linking audit tool can help you to understand your internal links better and offer assistance when it comes to structuring your web pages through using them. If your internal linking system is not up to scratch and there are a few issues that need to be resolved, this auditing tool will provide you with data about these problems and the best ways to fix them. 

How Can Our Markethinkers Team Help You With Internal Links?

As an SEO focused marketing agency, our team here at Markethinkers specialise in helping our clients better their user experience and gain higher rankings on search engine results pages. One of the most important SEO factors that need to be considered when managing a website are the internal links that you use. If you are asking yourself the question “what is internal linking in SEO and how can I use it to my advantage” then we are the team that you need to help you achieve your SEO goals! With our professional SEO consulting and SEO copywriting team to help you with any internal linking issues and audits, you are sure to have a website that is both user and search engine friendly! For the best team to help you achieve your SEO goals, look no further than our highly skilled experts here at Markethinkers.