Tackling the on-page aspect of your SEO strategy ought to involve internal links, as they’re a pillar of this approach. To help you to get started, we’ve created this guide to internal links and SEO, outlining the benefits, suggesting some best practices, and telling you what to avoid.
What is internal linking?
In SEO internal linking refers to adding hyperlinks from one page to another on the same website. In this way internal links connect pages together, usually on the basis of relevance, giving users easy access to more information about a specific topic or helping them to access a product.
What’s the point of internal links in SEO?
Internal links are a triple threat in SEO, carrying three key purposes – we’ve explained the main gist of each below.
They help users to find more relevant content on a specific topic
As we’ve already mentioned, internal links serve a purpose for users in the way they make it easy to navigate between content on a website. This concept applies to a range of different scenarios, making internal links a pretty versatile element of your on-page strategy. You could use internal links as a means of targeting different user intent types, by linking from informational blog posts to commercial landing pages (i.e. product categories). They can also be used in a similar way to add context to blog posts, giving users more information on a specific topic by linking between related articles.
They help search engines to discover and process content on a domain
Internal links also serve to enhance the way search engine systems (crawlers or bots) identify, understand, and index content. Before we get into this one, it’s worth noting that when we’re talking about internal links, we’re not referring exclusively to ‘text’ links, we’re also including the links that can be found in the navigation menu and footer of a website.
Search engine systems will encounter all types of internal links, processing them accordingly; this might look like understanding the hierarchy of a category page and its subcategories, or it could mean accessing a page that isn’t shown within your main navigation. In the second scenario, internal links help to keep ‘orphaned’ pages at bay (pages on a website that have no internal links pointing to them/aren’t linked to in the main navigation)
They distribute authority between pages
Internal links can also be used to impact individual page authority. Internal links pass authority to the page they’re pointing to, and a higher internal link count amasses more of this link authority – or ‘link juice’. This is where you can get really strategic with your usage of internal links, focusing them on a specific page to bolster its rankings, or using them to add value to content that might be flatlining.
How to devise an internal linking strategy
If you’re just getting to work on your own on-page SEO strategy, make internal links your first port of call and lay out some essential foundations with these tips.
Determine your website structure
Internal ‘navigational’ links serve as a means of mapping out the structure of your website for users, like signposts guiding them towards the content they’re looking for. Your main navigation exemplifies this, as it’s where you’ll show users the most important pages on your website, filtering down from top level categories to subcategories. Map out your structure, deciding the categories and relevant subcategories that you’ll need.
Link parent and child pages
Parent and child pages (i.e, category and subcategories) should be linked to and from one another, as this will help to solidify the hierarchy that you’ve outlined with your website structure. The content on the subcategories will be related to each other so we can also link between the child pages, and we’re always linking back to the parent page from here too.
Identify your priority pages
Want to use internal links to prioritise your most important pages? You need to know what they are first. Your top priority pages will vary depending on the type of business you have; for an ecommerce website, your category pages will likely be the top of your hierarchy, but for a professional service provider this title may fall to your service page(s). Either way, these pages will become some of the most important pages to link to.
Refine your anchor text
There’s a bit of debate around just how much of an impact anchor text has on the value that internal links add, as this post (caveat – it’s 3 years old now) explains. Our best advice is to make your link text simple and concise, ensuring that it gives some context to the destination page.
Pull link data for existing pages
It’d also be beneficial to identify any weak spots that already exist on your site, and you’ll need current link data in order to do this. Head over to Google Search Console, and choose the ‘links’ category from the side navigation bar. Here, you’ll see an overview of your internal links report, showing you the most to least linked pages.
Take a look at this and make note of any pages that may be further down the report, where you wouldn’t expect them to be. This gives you the starting point for an internal link audit, where you can focus on targeting pages that have a low internal link count, upgrading them by pointing more relevant links towards them from other areas of your website. This step is particularly helpful if there are opportunities for you to add contextual (more information on a topic) links between different blog posts or subcategories.
Review your sitemap regularly & keep watch for orphan pages
Sometimes, and especially with bigger websites, orphan pages can slip through the net. As part of your website audit approach, make time to identify these instances and improve them by adding relevant internal links. Next time you run a Screaming Frog crawl on your website, grant API access to your Google Search Console account and run the crawl analysis Here, you’ll find a list or orphaned pages, and you can get straight to work!
Internal linking best practices
As with pretty much every aspect of SEO, there are a few best practices for internal linking that you’ll want to follow if you want to make this part of your strategy work effectively for your website. Keep the following three principles in mind before you get trigger happy on the ctrl + K!
Avoid spammy usage
Imagine a blog post or commercial category page with every other two words underlined? This kind of internal link usage is a big red flag for users! It’s disruptive, and it’ll have the complete opposite effect that you’re aiming for. Keep your usage based on relevance, rather than setting out to squeeze as many links in as humanly possible.
Try not to over-link to the same page from one page
Using a ‘women’s trainers’ commercial subcategory page as an example, imagine you’re linking to this page from a ‘women’s green trainers’ page. You’ve taken the approach of adding ‘women’s trainers’ as a text link as many times as you physically can – this is another kind of ‘spammy’ tactic that some businesses still follow, for absolutely no reward.
Avoid keyword stuffing anchor text
Long, keyword-stuffed anchor text looks unnatural to both users and search engines, so avoid this. As we’ve suggested, keep your anchor text straight to the point and short.
SEO internal links will streamline your site for users and for search engines
Put this nifty part of on-page SEO to work, and use your internal link strategy to boost the visibility of the most important pages on your website. Bear in mind that this is just one aspect of your strategy, and we’re here to help you to piece the rest together. To understand what an impactful, results-driven SEO strategy might look like for your business, get in touch with us today.