What is internal link building and why is it important for SEO? What are the main things you need to take into consideration when setting up an internal link building strategy? And, how can you use this to your advantage?
Internal link building is exactly what it says on the tin – links that go from 1 page on your website to another page on your website.
Sound straightforward?
Well, in all honesty it is. However, this is often one of the simple SEO practices which gets completely overlooked.
Often digital marketers and SEOs will only think of backlink building when they hear the phrase ‘link building’.
The difference is, backlink building is about creating links from 1 page on another website to 1 page on your website.
It too is an incredibly important part of the SEO pie.
However, an effective internal link building strategy is much more flexible, easier and quicker to activate and can help you support the pages on your site rank higher over time for specific keywords, as well as your website’s overall SEO performance.
To explain how to build internal links for SEO effectively I’ll cover the following:
- The Objectives of Internal Link Building
- Internal Link Building Theory
- Rules for Effective Internal Link Building
The Objectives of Internal Link Building
The main objectives of effective internal link building for SEO purposes are the following:
- To distribute page authority across your site to help your websites ranking performance
- To improve the user experience (UX) of your website with helpful navigation
- To highlight the architecture and hierarchy of your website
So, let me break this down for you a little further and explain some of these terms.
Firstly, page authority is a metric defined by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engines results pages (SERPs).
Much like domain authority, page authority rises by the number and quality of links which are pointing to this specific page.
Where domain authority builds as a result of receiving votes of confidence that your site or page is a credible source with referring links from other domains, page authority can also be supported by internal linking.
For example, if you have created a large amount of content on your website, a lot of your blogs can link to these other pages where relevant.
This basically enables you to build and support the page authority of your own content instead of linking to too many external sources.
Also, by having a pool of high quality, relevant and useful content you can distribute ranking authority across the wider pages on your site.
This is particularly important if you’ve written a small sample of killer articles that have generated a lot of interest and backlinks.
This killer content will have a higher page authority than many of your other pages and could be ranking well on SERPs.
Why not use this page to support wider content on your site?
By tweaking some of the links on your killer articles to some of your lesser-known content, you are building the page authority and ranking authority of the other pages on your site with very minimal work.
It’s a no brainer.
Secondly, a recently more prominent ranking factor in SEO is a website’s user experience (UX).
This ranking factor is not only affected by how well a user responds to your landing page, but also the SERP result (before they got to your site) and, crucially here, what they click onto next.
Basically, it takes into account the effectiveness of the full user journey as opposed to just segments of it in isolation.
This makes it especially important that you keep the user on your website by directing them to further relevant and useful content.
Source: Boxes and Arrows, 2020
So, don’t just link to all the pages on your website to every article and blog page you have.
Instead, make every link count by ensuring they add significant value to the user’s journey.
Finally, Google and other search engines are going to regularly crawl all the pages on your website that you want them to (not those pages added to your robots.txt file).
When the bot crawls your page it will follow each link and consider this as the link hierarchy of your website.
Source: Code Neat, 2017
For instance, when the crawler comes to your homepage, it will consider the links in your top navigation as the secondary level and continue to click through until it understands the hierarchy and link structure of your entire website.
This is another reason why it makes sense to build your website clearly and logically.
For instance, if you have an articles section, all your articles should then sit underneath this part of your website to make it clear what they are and assign their hierarchical position clearly.
Failing to do this will lead to crawlers misunderstanding the importance and prominence of certain pages and sections.
Internal Link Building Theory
There’s a lot of talk about different link building strategies to drive higher rankings across the whole of your website throughout a variety of target SERPs.
However, in reality it’s quite tactical in practice and comes from you having sufficient quality content as well as making sure you link to these pages when it’s relevant and useful to the user.
In simplicity, internal linking theory suggests that by linking to relevant pages on your website you are supporting the rankability of your whole site rather than certain parts.
It’s about the team rather than the individual.
The reason internal linking supports your full sites rankability is due to the following factors:
- Longer User Sessions – users stay on your site longer
- Page Authority Distribution – well ranking pages supporting others where relevant
- Clear paths for spider crawlers – easier for search engines to crawl your site correctly
So, how can you best use internal linking to support your whole site’s rankability? Here are my top 8 tips.
Rules for Effective Internal Link Building
1. Create Plenty of Content
It’s pretty simple, if you want to be able to introduce lots of relevant internal links you need to have produced plenty of content.
Failing to do so will mean the majority of your linking will drive users away from your site, and you’ll want to minimise that as much as you can where possible.
To do this well you need to implement a robust content marketing strategy and take the time to create a series of high quality killer content.
By ensuring that all your content is set up well for SEO you’re not only using internal linking to support the rankability of your wider site, but you are also ensuring all of your content follows best practice methodology to become killer content itself.
Believe me I know what you’re thinking, this will take a lot of time to do properly. And I won’t lie to you, it does.
However, the benefits of producing high quality content within your niche, which can be used to support your other pages ranking and your website ranking as a whole, it’s well worth the time and investment.
It’s even worth checking back through your older pieces of content after you’ve produced a series of newer blogs or articles and replacing some external links with internal ones to support your new blogs or articles.
2. Use Target Anchor Text
Target anchor text is what separates great from good when it comes to internal linking.
For every piece of content you produce, you should know what keywords you’re targeting to rank that content for.
You should always outline which keywords you’re targeting for a piece of content with robust keyword research before you produce any new blogs or articles.
This means that you can then use specific anchor text in your internal links. This will help your other pages rank for the keywords you use in your anchor text.
For example, my internal link above includes the anchor text ‘keyword research’ as I want that page to rank for that term in the future.
The more links I have from other corresponding pages with similar anchor text helps spider crawlers understand clearly and consistently what I want each page to rank for.
However, don’t over do this!
What I mean is make sure your links are natural and flow in the content you’re producing. Don’t get trapped by the classic keyword stuffing irrespective of the context of the article.
Remember, you’re always writing for people first and foremost, so leave keyword stuffing and irrelevant content out if it’s not relevant and useful to your users given the context of each piece of content.
3. Focus on Helping the User
Internal linking must always centre around a user-focused approach by offering links of valuable, relevant and helpful information.
There is no difference between this and external linking.
If a source is irrelevant, leave it out.
Always ask yourself the question of does the proposed link support the user’s search? And, does it offer further value to the page?
This is where UX is incredibly important.
To be certain of whether the proposed link is worth including, make sure you check it against the following criteria:
- Is it contextually relevant?
- Does it add valuable and helpful information to the user?
- Does this support the user journey?
Remember, the aim is to be contextually relevant and helpful to your users with your links.
To help your whole site rank higher, you need to keep the user as engaged with content across your website for as long as possible.
If the links are irrelevant and unhelpful they will leave your website quickly which will negatively impact your rankability.
So, think of how you can support the user and keep it simple.
4. Use Relevant & Useful Links
Never link simply for the sake of linking.
There’s not a quota of links you need to add to your page to make it rank higher or be perceived as more credible than other sources.
Instead, always focus on the relevancy of each link.
For example, say I had a page on my website about Rome tours and another about London Tours.
Now, as useful as these pages may be for a tourism brand separately to cater to 2 distinct groups of shoppers, the relevance of crosslinking these pages for the merits of internal linking is negated.
Why?
Well, if you’ve done a search on Google for ‘Rome tours’, it’s highly likely you want to spend time in Italy. Therefore, it’s highly unlikely you want to also spend time in London given the context of your search and the page you’ve landed on.
Therefore, an irrelevant internal link can be detrimental if it leads to the following symptoms:
- Adds no valuable information to your users
- Impacts the UX of your pages
- Increases page bounce rates
So, make sure to only crosslink where it’s relevant and useful to your users in search of supplementary valuable information.
5. Use Follow Links
Always use follow links with internal linking.
What is this?
It’s basically an attribute you can add to each link on a page to tell web crawlers whether you want to pass page rank or not.
Your link attribute types at the time of writing are as follows:
- DoFollow – pases page rank
- NoFollow – does not pass page rank
- Sponsored – suggest the link has been bought, usually for advertising purposes
- UGC (user-generated content) – links added from users (e.g. in a comments section)
There has been a theory in the past that applying varying link attributes to your own internal linking is essentially another way you can game the system.
For instance, some SEOs believe that should you wish to strategically supply more page rank to 1 of your internal links above others, you should attribute the NoFollow link attribute to all other internal pages instead.
They believed this would not diffuse the page rank being passed between the links on your page, and therefore help the desired DoFollow attributed page rank higher in SERPs.
This is done because the introduction of the NoFollow link attribute in 2005 was intended to not influence the link target’s ranking in SERPs.
Basically, you could tell crawlers which links to give SEO value to and which ones to stop.
However, the NoFollow link attribute is there to stop black hat SEO backlink building and to encourage the link building of credible sources that support the E-A-T algorithm.
In simplicity, it is never wise to use any other link attribute other than DoFollow for all internal linking.
After all, dispersing the page authority whilst supporting relevant user journey’s is the objective of internal link building.
6. Use Deep Links & Avoid Unhelpful Links
The deeper your links go into your website the better.
Now, what do I mean by deep links?
Essentially, these are the links to very specific pages on your website such as blogs, articles or specific products and services which are not considered top level pages (pages that usually define your website navigation).
The reason for this is because all of your internal links should take the user to more specific relevant and useful information as opposed to less helpful pages.
The main pages to avoid linking to are the following:
- Homepage – focus on driving users to specific pages and avoid internal link building to your homepage as the intended purpose is to improve the overall SEO of your site
- Contact Us – again this is a top level page and does not provide a valuable source of information to the user, it is usually instead a call to action
- About Us – avoid top level pages like this unless you are writing content specifically about your company origin and culture
Internal link building is there to improve the overall SEO of your entire site, and should be used to support deeper links and not top level pages.
Again, always focus on the user. What information is relevant and useful? And, what links are natural?
7. Use a Sensible Amount of Internal Links
Don’t go crazy with adding every internal link you can find in your back catalog!
Google’s instructions are pretty straightforward: “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable amount”.
Now, what is a reasonable amount of links?
Good question (pass!).
Well, the general rule most SEOs will tell you is to avoid having over 100 links on your page.
These 100 links include your social widgets, suggested articles, navigation, internal links and any external links. So, though 100 links may sound like a lot, in actual practice it’s not that many.
Avoiding over 100 links means you’re meeting the following criteria:
- Avoiding too much diffusion of page rank – too many links impacts the value of each links page rank
- Avoiding poor UX – too many links can massively impact your bounce rates and lead to overly complex and confusing user journeys
Remember, the number of internal links you add to a piece of content also depends on the length of content itself.
As a rule of thumb, most of my blogs exceed 2000 words, and so I aim to add 4-6 internal links within each blog if they’re relevant (check back and see how many I’ve used!).
Don’t add too many links, and definitely don’t add them if they offer no value to your users.
8. Balance Internal Links with External Links
External links are not the enemy.
In fact, it’s a great thing to add external links to your content where relevant.
Why is this, after I’ve been preaching about the impact of internal links throughout this whole blog?
Well, first ask yourself are you going to write comprehensive guides on absolutely everything as well as wider useful content?
If you are, I salute you and say you need more sleep.
It’s simply impossible to keep on top of every topic and trend, as within every industry there will be tangential content you won’t and should not write about.
For instance, I don’t write in-depth content about specific algorithm updates, but I do link to the experts from Google that do.
Why?
Remember the E-A-T algorithm. You should link to external sources of expertise, authority and trustworthiness and accept you cannot be the guardian expert of everything.
Having a mixture of both external and internal links within your content also looks great to Google’s spider crawlers as it shows you are offering users a mixture of wider sources to continue their journeys which includes your expertise as well as others.
So, don’t be scared to include a number of external links. Instead, be more scared not to.
Conclusion
Effective internal link building is simple. Yes, there are a lot of rules but you should always focus on the simplicity of what both supports your wider content as well as providing relevant and useful wider information sources to your users.
The aim of internal linking is to help improve the overall SEO of your whole website, and what’s more, you have 100% control over it. You can tweak and modify links as you continue to produce great content and use the rules above to drive strong SEO value from effective internal link building for your website.
I hope my guide on how to build internal links for SEO was helpful and provided you with some clarity on its best practice usage. If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to read and respond to you in the comments section below.
