Complete Guide to Internal Linking Strategies for SEO

Have you ever heard the old SEO adage that content is king? Well, if that’s the case (and I believe it is), then links are queen. Not just backlinks either, though these will always remain important, despite no longer being among the top 3 ranking factors according to sources at Google. I’m talking about internal links.

There’s no getting around it so I’ll just cut right to the point: internal links are crucial for good SEO. Why, then, are they so badly executed in many cases? I’d argue it’s because internal linking, more specifically internal linking for SEO, is a very misunderstood subject. Today I’ll try to clear that up. So, if your site’s internal links could use some work, if your user journey is confused or if you’re an SEO looking to add a new layer to their strategies and grow their rankings, read on. This post is for you!

What is an Internal Link?

To use internal links to better our SEO, we need to understand what they are in the first place! Simply put, an internal link is a hyperlink from a page that points to another page in the same domain. Perhaps the best example of this would be a website’s navigation bar as this allows a user to quickly access key areas of the site from any page within it. Navbar links are one of the most important types of internal link. We’ll cover a few more later.

The Importance of Internal Links for SEO

I’ll go into this further on in this article, but as I said above, internal links are crucial for SEO. Why? Because they’re how users get around your website! And search engine crawlers. This means they make the pages on the site easier to access and more discoverable.

To better explain this, allow me to present an analogy I’ve always found useful. Think of a website as being like a spider web (clue’s in the name, right?). The pages on the site are like the points of the web, whilst the site’s internal links are the strands that join them together. As such, we need to consider where pages are in relation to one another and which ones should be linked together. This isn’t just good for SEO, it’s good for the user experience as well, which is becoming increasingly important for ranking well.

Types of Internal Link

There are several places on a site you might find an internal link, but they tend to fall into two main types: navigational and contextual. Each plays an important role in the overall structure of the site and the user experience.

Navigational Links

As the name suggests, navigational links are the ones that help a user to navigate a site. In short, the better your navigational links, the easier your site is to get around and the more likely it is your visitors will be able to find what they’re looking for. You’ll find these in a few areas:

Navigation Bar

Most often referred to as the navbar, this is the area you’ll see at the top of almost every page, following you around the site and providing you with a set of core links to help you find your way. To use another analogy, think now of a website as being like a country. To visit a specific city, we need to use roads to get there. The links to a page are like the roads into a city in that they help you get there and make it more accessible. In this case, your navbar links, especially those at the top level, are like motorways; they’re the easiest and often fastest way to get at least close to where you’re trying to go.

Footer

Similar to the main navigation bar, the footer menu of a site will usually link to less important pages in the user journey that still provide relevant information. A good example would be a company’s About Us page. As the name suggests, footer links appear at the bottom, or foot, of the site.

Breadcrumbs

Often overlooked but no less crucial are breadcrumbs. These basically summarise the user’s onsite journey so far, showing them where they’ve come from and where they are in relation to the homepage. Breadcrumbs often appear close to the top of a page, underneath the header and main navigation:

Ask yourself how many times you’ve been shopping online and needed to go back a step to look for something different. Breadcrumbs accomplish this in a much more visual and reliable way than hitting the back button multiple times and stop you having to start from scratch. Implementing them properly should be a core SEO consideration for any website!

Why is Internal Linking Crucial for SEO?

I’ve probably said it enough times now, so I’m sure you just want me to get to the point already: why is internal linking such a big part of a site’s SEO? Well there are quite a few reasons actually:

It Makes a Site Easier to Crawl

Without internal links, your site would be impossible for search engine crawlers to navigate. To understand this, let’s first think about what happens when a crawler (sometimes called a spider) visits a website:

• txt – The first thing most search engine bots will do (certainly all the reputable ones) is check the robots.txt file of the website. This contains instructions for where crawlers of various types should and shouldn’t go. Optimising the robots.txt file is an important consideration for larger sites to maximise the efficiency of their crawl budget (more on this another time).
• Discovery – Now the crawler knows where it can access, it will go about discovering pages on the site. This is achieved in a few ways, namely crawling previously crawled URLs, checking the sitemap for new pages and, you guessed it, following the internal links of pages.
• Fetching and Parsing – The page’s HTML content must now be retrieved and parsed (analysed) by the crawler. All links discovered within the HTML are then added to the queue for future crawling.

The final stages of the process are rendering and indexing, but again these are topics for another post. Can you see how the presence of internal links makes the information in a site so much easier to discover?

Better User Experience

As I’ve said before and no doubt will say again many times, better UX leads to better SEO and vice versa. Just as internal links make a site’s pages easier to discover for crawlers, so to do they for users. A well placed internal link can direct your user to the next stage of their journey at exactly the right moment, whether that be to educate them further about a product or service, move them a step closer to a purchase or simply to raise awareness. Internal links are great for all this and more.

Greater Engagement Rates and Session Times

Somewhat related to the last point, internal links are a great way to improve your site’s engagement. Presenting related content to a page user not only engages them further, it also increases their session time. Both of these are positive ranking signals!

Distribution of Page Authority

This is probably the most misunderstood part of a very misunderstood subject! The concept of page authority is likely familiar to you if you have any form of background in SEO. For those that don’t know, all web pages are assigned a number between 1 and 100 and the higher this number, the more likely that page is to rank well in search results. The score was originally developed by Moz but has become a bit of an industry standard metric. Other SEO tools have similar metrics, such as AhRefs’ DR and UR and SEMRush’s aptly named Authority Score. There are many factors that go into calculating these scores, in fact the number is similar to that of the Google algorithm itself! However, the usual culprits such as high quality content, relevance, engagement and good old backlinks all come into play.

Anyway, I digress; how does all this relate to internal linking for SEO? Well, if you’ve ever heard of link equity (‘link juice’) then you’ll know that dofollow links pass along some of the linking page’s authority. This is fairly common knowledge for backlinks, but did you know that the same is true of internal links? That’s right, you can use internal links to pass authority between your pages.

Consider the above point for a second, and just how powerful that can be. In this way, not only can you send your audience to the right place on your site, you can also bring up important pages that may not have the authority they should. This is especially true for newly created pages. As a case in point, if you’ve just published a new blog post then you could accelerate its rankings by linking to it from higher authority pages on your site, most notably the homepage. Try this the next time you publish a blog and see how much quicker it gets indexed and begins to rank. The one caveat? Make sure it’s a dofollow link; like backlinks, internal links can also be nofollow and therefore not pass along any authority.

Internal Linking Best Practices

Now we know why internal linking is important for SEO, how do we best go about implementing it? I have a few tips for you that I’ll get into below, but above all I advise you to keep the user experience at the heart of everything you do. This will ensure you’re always optimising for the people actually visiting your site and not just pleasing the robots. Sure, robots are great and they help you to rank, but it’s the real humans reading your content that generate revenue and keep your business afloat!

Here are my tips to overhaul your internal linking strategy:

Use Descriptive Anchor Text

Anchor text, or the text you actually click to follow a link, is very important. Consider this very website; we’re a digital marketing agency based in Somerset, and one of the services we offer is SEO. So, we’d definitely be interested in traffic from users searching for ‘Somerset SEO agency’, right? In that case, we can pass authority for specific keywords by using them as anchor text. While I’m on the subject, if you’re looking for an SEO agency in Somerset, get in touch! See what I did there? Genius!

It’s also important to note that your link profile should be natural, and contain a good balance of different types of anchor text. Too many keyword heavy links can appear spammy, so try and include various types alongside these such as calls to action, brand mentions and image links.

Maintain a Logical Site Structure

The structure of your website and the hierarchy of the pages within it are crucial for both its SERP rankings and its user experience. When formulating your internal linking strategy, consider the page you are placing the link on, how it relates to other pages on your website and where it sits in the user journey. Think logically; is there any point placing a link back to your homepage in a product description? Of course not! On the other hand, is it worth adding a link to a relevant service you offer at the end of a blog post? Definitely.

Maintaining a logical and well thought out site structure is great for both the users on your site and the robots crawling it. Pages perform much better if they sit in the correct place within the user journey and their rankings will improve as a result.

Limit the Number of Internal Links Per Page

Or should I say, the number of links in general per page… How many times have you gone to read a webpage, only to find that every other word is underlined and in a different colour? Overusing links on a page is ugly and it destroys the user experience. What’s more, it kills the authority of those links too. The more you link out from a page, whether to another page on your site or to an external page (with a dofollow link) the less authority each of those links is going to pass.

The above isn’t to say that you should avoid internal links, simply that you should think strategically when placing them and use them sparingly. Just as we only try to incorporate keywords into our SEO copy naturally, so too should we only add an internal link if it will benefit the user and actually add to the page experience.

Regularly Audit and Update Your Internal Links

This is the one everyone forgets. Like SEO as a whole, a lot of people take a bit of a ‘set it and forget it’ approach to their internal linking strategy. For optimal results, you should be monitoring your links and the effect they have constantly. For my clients, I conduct an audit of their site’s internal links quarterly as a bare minimum.

When auditing your internal links, check how they are performing and how they are contributing to the site’s structure. Tools such as Screaming Frog come in really handy here, but these days my tool of choice is Sitebulb. I honestly cannot overstate how brilliant this tool is for such a small monthly cost. Sitebulb will allow you to see key link and structure metrics such as page depth, link locations and even link anchor text distribution.

Link profiles can change very quickly, so keeping on top of them and keeping them optimised is an important task for any website!

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Like we’ve already established, internal linking for SEO is a very misunderstood subject. Naturally, then, it leads to a lot of mistakes being made. Sometimes these just result in an SEO strategy that’s not quite optimal, but occasionally they can have a catastrophic impact on a site and its rankings. Here’s a few common ones I see all the time:

Overusing Exact Match Anchor Text

Remember earlier, when I spoke about target keywords and proceeded to shamelessly plug our Somerset SEO agency? That’s an example of exact match anchor text, where the anchor text is the same as the target keyword or term you want to rank for. Notice how I just did it again? It’s almost like I want you to check out our SEO services…

Joking aside though, I placed those 2 internal links very carefully, and made sure they flowed naturally within the text. They look like they should be there, right? If I’d placed them alongside 10 others, all relating to SEO in Somerset, that would be horrific, both for the user experience and for a search crawler.

Overusing exact match anchor text is highly detrimental to a site’s SEO because it is spammy and serves as a signal to a search engine of unnatural and manipulative link building practices. The best case scenario here is that the page’s rankings may suffer, the worst is that your entire site may receive a manual penalty. This can take months to recover from, so don’t overuse exact match anchor text!

Linking to Irrelevant Content

This links back to both the structure of the site and to keeping user experience as your primary consideration in everything you do. All too often I see a page linking to completely unrelated content, probably because the poor author of said page has read somewhere that internally linking to their new post will give it an authority boost.

I can’t state this enough: make sure any link you place in the body of a page is relevant to that page! Boosting the authority of a new page won’t matter if you completely lose your user by sending them to something that’s not relevant to what they were looking at before. Think smarter, keep it relevant and keep it engaging!

Nofollowing Internal Links

This one happens all the time and likely originates from a common fear of dofollow links destroying your page authority. They don’t; this is a myth. If I had to guess, the fact that a dofollow link passes some authority with it has led most people to believe that said authority is being subtracted from their own page’s. It isn’t! Provided the link goes to a trustworthy site and that there isn’t an excessive number of links from the page in question.

So, now we’ve cleared up the above, make sure all your internal links are dofollow links. This ensures search engine crawlers are able to navigate your site and discover new pages more quickly, as well as bringing up the authority of your lesser pages.

Neglecting Your Deeper Pages

If you want your whole website to be indexed and not just its top-level pages, you need to be linking to those lower down in the hierarchy! There are lots of ways to do this, for example having a blog feed on your homepage which links to your latest posts. This ensures your posts are visible right away, allowing users to view them quickly and search engines to crawl them effectively.

Internal Linking Tools

I’ve already discussed a couple of useful tools for internal link building and auditing, but here’s a few from my personal arsenal that I strongly recommend you take a look at:

Sitebulb

I know, we already went over this one but it’s so good I had to mention it again! If you aren’t using Sitebulb already you should be. I was fortunate enough to meet the Sitebulb team at BrightonSEO and they were the talk of the event, with multiple speakers recommending the tool.

Sitebulb is an all in one website auditing tool that not only identifies issues within a site, it tells you how to fix them in the form of hints. It will show the crawl and click depth of every page on your site, expose any orphaned pages (those with no incoming links) and so much more besides. There’s a 30-day free trial available and pricing starts from just £8.25 per month for the Lite version. The Pro version is even better, and punches way above its weight in terms of value at £22.50 per month for an annual plan.

Find Sitebulb Here

SEO Plugins

Okay, if we’re being strict then this is a WordPress specific tip, but other CMS platforms do offer equivalents to SEO plugins that you can take advantage of. I would advise taking the suggestions offered by SEO plugins such as Yoast and RankMath with a pinch of salt, but they do offer useful insights if you know where to look. Yoast, for example, is awful for rating the SEO score of a page but offers an excellent tool for helping build internal links. Designing and implementing an internal linking strategy is time consuming and requires a lot of work, so be sure to leverage tools like this to do some of the heavy lifting where possible!

AhRefs, SEMRush or Similar

We use AhRefs, but most of the other SEO tools and platforms offer similar functionality. In Ahrefs, you can generate an extensive report of every internal link on your site, then view the authority of each page, anchor text of each link and more. If you’re serious about your SEO as a whole, a tool like AhRefs or SEMRush is essential and will pay for itself many times over in the insights it provides you with and the time it saves.

Google Search Console

Yes, the data in GSC is almost always incomplete and yes, Google’s suite of tools seems to be becoming more and more unreliable these days (I’m looking at you, PageSpeed Insights!) but even partial data is better than no data at all. The Links section of GSC is actually quite useful, and opening the internal links report will allow you to see which of your pages have the most internal links, as well as those that may need more attention.

I could go on all day talking about the different tools available because there are hundreds. The truth is you just need to try a few out, form your own software stack and find what works for you. My advice, however, would be to invest in one SEO tool, either AhRefs or SEMRush, and then purchase a Sitebulb Pro license. These 2 tools will be plenty to assist you with the vast majority of internal linking issues you’ll come up against.

Bringing It All Together

If you made it to the end, congratulations! Hopefully you’ve learned that internal linking is extremely important for SEO but is very misunderstood and often poorly executed. If there’s one thing you should take from this, it’s to always keep user experience at the forefront. Place your links intelligently, make sure they add value for the user and you’ll be well on your way to improving your rankings. If what I’ve discussed today sounds a bit confusing, or if you need help designing and implementing your own internal linking strategy for SEO, reach out to us today and I’ll be happy to help advise you.