Internal linking 101: Your Complete Guide to Internal Linking for Search Engines

Internal linking is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal.

It can be used to amplify content authority effectively.

Internal linking, when done effectively, structures a site so that both search engines and human users may easily navigate it.

This guide by experts at leading  SEO company in Mumbai will introduce you to an internal linking strategy and teach you how to apply this strategy to your website.

So, Let’s get started.

 

What Is Internal Linking?

Internal linking is connecting one page on a website to another page on that website. This can be done through links in the text or anchor text (text used to create links). For example, if you were to link from a blog post to another blog post on the same website, this would be an internal link.

These links tell search engines which pages are related and can help them determine the most relevant content for each query. If you want to rank well in search engines, you need to ensure that your site has plenty of internal links. Internal linking also improves the user experience because it helps visitors navigate your site more easily.

 

Code Example of Internal link:

<a href=“http://www.same-domain.com/” title=“Keyword Text”>Keyword Text</a>

 

Types of Internal Links

Navigational and contextual links are the two types of internal links. Let’s examine both.

• Navigational Internal Links

These are usually hyperlinked words or phrases that lead to other pages on your website.

For example, if you have an “About” page, you may link to it from multiple places on your site with the word “About.” This makes it easier for people to find the information they’re looking for, especially when they’re already on your website.

• Contextual Internal Links

 

These hyperlinks appear inside text content on your site (as opposed to being displayed as a separate link). When someone sees the relevant words in context and clicks them, they’ll be taken directly to the corresponding page.

For example, if someone searches for “what is Digital marketing,” and one of our articles answers that question, we may include an internal contextual link with those words so that users can jump directly from our article page to our marketing guide.

 

Why Is It Important?

Internal linking helps users navigate your website by providing shortcuts between pages, helping them find what they are looking for more quickly.

They help readers understand how all the pieces fit together on your website, making it easier for them to navigate through it and find what they’re looking for (which increases conversions).

They help readers find related content they might be interested in reading based on what they’ve already read (increases engagement).

As experts at leading digital marketing agency will tell you that Internal linking helps search engines crawl through your site more efficiently, which allows them to find more pages to index and rank for relevant keywords.

They also help search engines understand the depth and breadth of your website, which helps them better determine what content should be displayed in search results. The more relevant content Google sees on your site, the higher it will rank for relevant keywords and phrases!

Internal linking allows users to navigate around your site without clicking on external links. For example, you might have a page about “How much does a new car cost?” at https://www.example-site-name.com/how-much-does-a-new-car-cost/ and another page about “How much do cars cost in California?” at https://www.example-site-name.com/how-much-do-cars/. With internal linking, these two pages would be connected if someone landed on one page and wanted to know more about how much cars cost in California.

 

Internal Links Vs. External Links

Internal links connect your site’s pages. They’re important because they show search engines that your website is an authority in the niche, and they help visitors navigate from page to page.

External links are links to external sites (outside of your website). External links are important for SEO because they give the search engines more information about your site.

It’s a common misconception that external links provide more value than internal links. This isn’t true. Internal links are equally as valuable as external ones, but for different reasons:

Internal links provide context for search engines to understand better what your content is about. They also help visitors find related content on your site without leaving it.

External links provide context for search engines to understand better what content you’re linking to outside of your website. It also helps them understand how knowledgeable you are about certain topics and how much authority you have in the niche or industry.

 

Content-to-content relationships

Internal links are links to other pages on your site. They’re important because they show search engines that your website is an authority in the niche, and they help visitors navigate from page to page.

The Digital marketing services providers will tell you that the external links are links to external sites (outside of your website). External links are important for SEO because they give the search engines more information about your site.

It’s a common misconception that external links provide more value than internal links.

This isn’t TRUE

Internal links are equally as valuable as external ones, but for different reasons:

• Internal links provide context for search engines to understand better what your content is about. They also help visitors find related content on your site without leaving it.
• External links provide context for search engines to understand better what content you’re linking to outside of your website. It also helps them understand how knowledgeable you are about certain topics and how much authority you have in the niche or industry.

 

Value of a Link

The value of a link is often a combination of the link text and the anchor text.

Links from authority sites will be more valuable than links from non-authority sites. Links from .edu domains are more valuable than links from .com domains. Links from .gov domains will be more valuable than links from .org domains.

Links with exact match anchor text are more valuable than those with a partial match or no match anchor text.

Links on pages with high-quality content are more valuable than links on pages with low-quality content because they indicate that the page has something valuable to offer visitors.

Links that point to your homepage or root domain (e.g., www.example.com) are more valuable than links that point to subpages or secondary pages (e.g., http://www.example.com/about). The reason is that these links imply that your site has strong branding, which makes it easier for search engines to trust you since they exactly know what they’re getting into when they visit your site.”

Best Practices for Internal linking

• Use keyword-rich anchor text.

Internal links are essentially navigation links that take users from one page to another inside your site. So why not use them as an opportunity to tell Google something about what kind of content lies ahead? For example, if there’s a page on my site about “how to sell ebooks,” I might want to link to it from other places on my site with anchor text like “sell ebooks.” That way, when someone types “sell ebooks” into Google, they’ll see my link in the search results and click through immediately — without clicking through multiple pages until they get there.

 

• Link to Important Pages

Link to pages that are of high value and importance to users — especially landing pages, contact information, and other high-traffic pages. This will help users find what they need more easily and help search engines determine which pages on your site are most important.

 

• Use Different Anchor Text For Different Pages

If someone visits two different pages on your site, they should not see the same anchor text used in a link pointing to both pages. This would be unclear for both users and search engines.

Use one unique keyword or phrase as the anchor text in your internal links, and don’t repeat it on multiple pages. If you have multiple pieces of content covering the same topic, try using combinations of keywords in your anchor text instead of repeating the same keyword repeatedly.

 

• Using Google Search Console, check internal links.

If you have a large site, it may be difficult to keep track of all these internal links. Luckily, some tools make it easy to audit your entire site at once.

The best way to audit internal links is with the Google Search Console, which is free and easy to use. You can find it at g.co/SearchConsole in your browser’s address bar.

Once you’re logged in, go to Crawl > Crawl Errors > Fix Internal Links. This will give you a list of all the pages on your site that Google thinks should have internal links but don’t. It also shows how many external links are pointing at each page, so you can see if one page has too few or too many external links relative to others on your site.

 

Common Internal Link Problems

Understanding the common issues and how to resolve them is an important aspect of this.

Here are a few of the most common issues in this area:

• Broken Internal Links

The problem: Users and search engine crawlers are sent to non-existent web pages when internal links are broken, resulting in 404 errors, which is not ideal for communicating with authority.

The solution: To fix it, either remove the link or replace it with one that leads to a live page.

 

• Links Couldn’t be Crawled.

The Problem: When the URL format is incorrect, this error occurs. It could, for example, contain extra characters.

The solution: Check for broken links and make any necessary formatting changes.

 

• Too Much On-page Internal Linking

The Problem: In the Site Audit report, a page with more than 3,000 links will be identified. Although there is no set limit on how many on-page links Google will crawl these days, webmasters should avoid overloading pages from a usability standpoint.

The solution: Any pages with more than 3,000 links should be audited, and those that are no longer needed should be removed.

 

• Outgoing Internal Links with Nofollow Attributes

The Problem: Googlebot’s flow through your site is restricted by the rel=”nofollow” attribute in links on particular pages.

The Solution: Remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from any internal links highlighted by the report. If required, check with your developer to see if this can be set site-wide or per link.

 

• Pages with Orphaned Sitemaps

The Problem: An orphaned page isn’t connected to any other page on your website, so it can’t be crawled or indexed.

The Solution: Include orphaned pages in your internal linking strategy if they could be beneficial. Consider deleting it or adding a “noindex” tag if it should not exist or be ranked by search engines.

 

• More than three-click page crawl depth

The Problems: Some essential pages need too many clicks to reach, signaling search engines that they are not very important.

The Solution: Determine where you can save time by reducing the number of clicks required to get users to the content they desire.

 

• Only one internal link per page

The Problem: Internal links on their own can lead to lost SEO and UX possibilities. As previously said, you should connect to crucial pages from other related information wherever possible.

The Solution: As part of your internal linking strategy, find other related pages to link to.

 

• Permanent Redirects

The Problem: Internal links can be passed through permanent redirection to save money on crawling, especially for larger sites.

The Solution: Internal links should be updated to guide visitors and search engines to the target page (don’t remove the redirect if it is still attracting traffic from other sources).

 

• Chains and Loops should be redirected.

The Problem: Search engines have difficulty crawling internal links that cause redirect chains and loops.

The Solution: Update internal links to connect to the proper live page, as described above. In addition, locate the source of loops or delete intermediary redirects in a chain (change the redirect to proceed from the origin page to the end of the redirect path).

 

• HTTPS pages have links to HTTP pages

The Problem: Unnecessary redirects can be caused by URLs that incorrectly address HTTP pages on secure sites.

The Solution: If you’re working on a small scale, manually update any HTTP links to point to HTTPS pages; ask your developer for assistance if you’re working on a larger scale.

 

Internal Link Auditing

Auditing your site’s internal links is simple: go through each page on your website and look at how it is linked to other pages. You want to ensure that every page has at least one internal link pointing back to it from another page on your site (the exception is homepages or landing pages).

If no internal links are pointing back at any page in particular, then that means that people can’t find those pages easily or quickly and won’t be able to access them easily. It also means that search engines have a harder time finding those pages, potentially hurting both user experience and SEO.

Th best SEO Services provider says that the easiest way to do this audit is by using Google Search Console or SEMrush. In Google Search Console, go into Crawl Errors, then select “Internal Server Error (500)”, then sort by error count descending; you should see all the pages with no internal links pointing back at them first. In SEMrush, go into Fetch as Google, click “SEO Audit,”; scroll down until you see the “Internal Links” section.

Auditing your existing internal links is important because it helps you find pages that are missing out on valuable link juice from other important pages on your site. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site more efficiently by using link signals from internal pages, but it also gives users a more cohesive experience as they navigate through your site.

 

Building an Internal Linking Strategy

Your audit will show you where you can fix current internal linkage issues. Your website’s strategy will let you build on it to achieve game-changing results.

Let’s have a look at some options.

 

• Identifying the Hub Pages on Your Website

Hub pages are pages that link to many other pages on your site. These pages are often the most important pages on your site and should be well-linked internally. They also tend to be some of the most popular pages, so they’re good candidates for SEO optimization as well. For example, if you have a large website with lots of different sections, like a news site or online magazine, one of those sections could be considered a hub page because it provides links to all of the other sections. How do you find these hub pages for that? Here are some of the tips

 

Use Ahrefs’ Backlinks feature to see who’s linking to each page on your site.

Check out SEMrush’s backlink analysis tool — this will show you which pages receive the most backlinks from external sources.

Check out Majestic’s link metrics tool — this will show you what percentage of total links each page has.

 

• Using Internal Links to Create Topic Clusters

Every website has its unique topics, and internal linking can be used to show connections between those topics. Some websites have only one main topic they focus on; others may have many different topics they want to cover. If you’re using internal linking in this way, make sure that all of your pages are related somehow — maybe they’re about specific products or industries, or maybe they’re just related through general content areas (for example, all of the pages might be about marketing). This’ll help users find what they’re looking for faster and make it easier for them to navigate around your site once they’ve landed there.

•  Identifying the Authority Pages on Your Website

The first step in building an internal linking strategy is identifying your site’s high authority pages. These pages have a strong chance of earning links from other sites and are also important to users.

High authority pages can be identified by looking at the number of links they have, their overall PageRank, how well they perform in search engines, how often they are shared and how many mentions they receive on social media.

For example, if you have a blog post with many backlinks and social shares, it’s likely to be considered a high authority by Google. Similarly, if you have a product page that ranks highly for certain keywords and gets lots of traffic from organic search, then this is another example of a high authority page.

Once you’ve identified your high authority pages, it’s time to create internal links between them.

 

• Increasing the Ranking of Target Pages Through Internal Links

Once you’ve found them, you may utilize your site’s authority pages to help others boost their rankings.

Working through your most authoritative pages and spotting opportunities to pass link authority onto others when appropriate can be a straightforward element of this plan.

This can be rather simple if you’re working with a site with many high-quality links.

All you have to do now is go through the pages with the most valuable links and look for possibilities to link to your most vital pages or those that require a rating boost.

 

• Internal Links for Fresh Content Optimization

If you’re dealing with a site that doesn’t have a lot of links, you might start by optimizing new material.

This will entail looking through a list of authoritative pages to see if there are any opportunities for relevant interlinking to improve your search results.

One approach is to run a few Google searches using the keywords from your new piece of content to locate other comparable pages on your site to link to.

For example, we might look for “site:syspree.com internal links” to identify other articles connected to this guide and add reciprocal links where appropriate to make use of any current authority they may have:

These methods can help you increase internal linking by guaranteeing more pages share authority.

 

Conclusion

Internal linking is a valuable organic SEO strategy. We believe that every website owner, business, or individual should take advantage of it to help enhance and grow their online presence. Good luck with your current internal linking and link-building efforts, and we hope that this guide has provided you with a few tips that you can put to use on your site today. If you would like to know about image Metadata, then check out our blog, 2022 image metadata & all you need to know about it!