If you are thinking of starting a new website, then this guide to internal links is a must for you. Why? Whether you are going to establish an e-commerce website or blog posts, it has to be search engine optimized. 

One of the important factors of SEO is links. It means the links you attach to your web pages are integral to SEO. There are two types of links that you can use on your website: external links and internal links. 

Here, we are going to talk about internal links. As the name suggests, internal links are links that point to pages within your own website. In short, whenever you use a link from one webpage of your website on another, it's called an internal link. 

Now, let's talk about how internal links actually work. Well, when search engines like Google crawl your website, it reads all other web pages of your website through links. So, if you have attached internal links to all your web pages, then only they will be crawled by search engines. 

Let's take an example to understand this. If you have used any website before, what have you noticed? Isn't it that you first land on the homepage and then see various links to other web pages? Depending on the website, they can be 'About Us', 'Contact', or many others. 

All these links are internal links that make it easy for you to navigate through the website. It enhances the user experience, one of the factors that search engines use to rank websites. So, to summarize, if you have used internal links well on your website, it can rank higher on search engines. 

Types Of Internal Links 

Now that you know what internal links are, you should also know how many internal links there are. Although there are various forms of internal links, some of the main ones are, 

Navigational Links 

Navigational links are important links for your website that help the users to navigate through the website. Using these links, users can find whatever they want on your website. 

Contextual Links 

In a webpage, contextual links are used in the main body of the content. These links generally point out to other relevant topics of the content. Suppose you have a website that provides training in culinary arts. Now, there will be various recipes listed on your website. 

In one of those recipes, you can link to another, having any similar ingredient or anything else common in both. These links are contextual links that expand ideas on ideas relevant to the content. 

Footer Links 

As the name shows, these links are at the bottom of a webpage. These links redirect the users to your About Us page, contact page, or privacy policy page. They are important for other details on your website, but there are other website navigation methods. 

Breadcrumb Link 

These links are generally found at the top of the website and help users find their way around it. Usually, a website with various web pages uses these links so users can head back to the main page. 

As a response by Google, they noted that these links are treated as normal links by the search engine. 

Why Internal Links Are Important For You

After talking about internal links in detail, we should head towards their benefits to your website. Internal links offer various advantages to your website; however, some are below. 

Help Users To Navigate Through Your Website

The foremost benefit internal links offer your website is improved user experience. When a user lands on your website, they will want to learn about what you offer. And for that, they want to explore your website more, for which navigational internal links are essential. 

If contextual links redirect users, they can discover your extensive offerings.

With footer links and breadcrumb links, they will know more about your website and can find their way back to the homepage easily. Thus, internal links as a whole are important for a good user experience of a website. 

Moreover, search engines also consider this thing while ranking websites. So, websites with well-planned internal linking tend to get recognized by search engines. 

To Index Your Website 

Do you know how Google finds your website or crawls it? Well, it's a simple yet sophisticated process in which Google crawlers work daily to find new and fresh content. In this process, they use links to crawl through a website. 

Similarly, other search engines follow link paths throughout the vast internet to find and index websites. If your website has robust internal linking, this finding and indexing process becomes swift. 

Ultimately, this quick crawling and indexing of your website can improve your SEO and increase your rank on search engines. So, you need to make your internal linking solid and well-executed. 

Make Internal Pages Important 

Do you know what link juice is? Whenever one page is linked to another page, the flow from page 1 to page 2 is called link juice. 

This link juice helps the website appear on the SERPs or search engine result pages. It shows the importance of your internal pages to the search engines. The quality of your well-knitted internal links determines how the site will perform on the search engine crawling. 

Enhance Backlink Earning Capacity Of Deep Content Pages 

Most of the internal links are redirected to your home page. However, this should be different because too much internal linking to your homepage or any page can cause over-optimization. 

Also, your website's homepage isn't the only thing users want to see. They want to see what your deep content pages have to offer. 

Paying attention to your internal linking and including your deep content pages can improve your overall SEO. Also, it can help you index faster and get a high ranking on search engines. 

Internal Links With Optimized Anchor Text Can Help With SEO

You can attach internal links to navigational texts or images under various options. However, its quality is enhanced when you attach an internal link to an anchor. 

It will be even better if you use your keyword of the content as an anchor text for internal links. It gives your internal link keywords and content, elevating its quality. 

Whenever search engines find internal links on anchor texts that are well-optimized, it gives the website a higher ranking. So remember not to overuse the anchor text and internal links on your web pages. 

Help Search Engines To Understand Your Website 

Google has opened up on internal linking, saying it crawls websites through their links. While some pages are already known because Google has crawled them before through internal links. Some pages are discovered by Google when it follow a link from a known page to another new page. 

So, if you strategically plan internal linking on your website, search engines can understand its structure very well. Through internal linking, search engines understand how one page is related to another. 

How To Design Internal Link Structure 

Above is an example of a topic cluster model for internal linking.

In our guide to internal links, we have discussed the benefits of internal links. Hence, it has become important to know how to strengthen your website's internal linking. Below are the steps that you can use to do that.

• Start With Planning. Planning is the key to strengthening your website's internal linking structure. It is the basic step, and you can modify it later on as needed. 

• Highlight Main Pages. When you want to strengthen your website's internal linking, focus on the main pages. Think about the pages you want to highlight or the pages users want to see. Now, incorporate these web pages into your internal linking structure. 

• Link To Relevant Content. Whenever you internally link to your website, make contexts while doing so. Internal linking to content that is context to another is important to help users know what the content is about. It also helps in a comprehensive knowledge of your website and what it offers users.  

• Make Topic Clusters. When you are internally linking, try to make topic clusters. For example, if your one webpage is focused on SEO. Then, make a topic cluster of it with other related ideas like keyword research, SEO practices, or benefits of SEO.  

• Select Appropriate Anchor Text. Above, we have noted the importance of anchor text to internal links. So, whenever you are using internal links, make sure to choose the correct anchor text. It has to be relevant to the link, brief, and properly optimized. 

• Use Authority Pages On Your Website. If you have an authoritative external link to a page, you can link it to any other website page. In this way, the authority obtained by the first page can also be shared by the second one. It will make your internal linking powerful and pass authority to other pages. 

How To Audit Your Website For Internal Links 

This guide to internal links will be incomplete without discussing how to audit your website for internal links. If you have established a website, then you need to keep a check on it regularly. 

As per your preference, the period can be six months or a year. However, it is important to check the internal links on your website. Review your website thoroughly to identify areas where internal linking can be improved. Are there any broken links or orphan pages that need to be fixed? Can you use new linking opportunities to enhance the user experience on your website?

Also, you can generate internal linking reports using various tools and know if there is any problem with your internal links. These can include internal link distribution, page crawl depth, and pages passing most internal links. 

After getting the report, you can work on fixing the issues. When your website's overall internal linking is improved, you can achieve a high ranking on search engines. 

How To Fix Common Internal Link Problems

Once you have created a website, you can encounter issues with your internal links. Here, we will address some common internal link problems and how you can solve them.

Broken Internal Links

It happens when you have linked to a page that is either deleted or the link is mistyped. It sends the search engines and users to pages that don't exist. 

To fix this, check your internal linking report and find the 'Errors' section. Under this section, you will get information on broken links. To solve the problem, you can remove the link or replace it with one that opens up on a live page. 

Stuffing Internal Links 

In SEO, always remember that stuffing anything is bad, be it keywords or internal links. If you have stuffed your website with lots of internal links, then it can be confusing for users and search engines to find and crawl the important internal links. 

So, always use the optimum number of links on your website. Also, see your Internal Linking report, and under the section 'Warning,' find the pages with too many links. To solve the problem, review the pages and remove unnecessary links. 

Orphaned Pages 

These are the pages without any internal links from any of the pages of your domain. As search engines can find a page through links, it gets tough to find orphaned pages. Thus, search engines can't crawl them, and this can affect your ranking. 

If the orphaned is not valuable to your website, you can remove or redirect it. You can also add a 'noindex' tag to it. And if the page is valuable, you must include it in your internal linking strategy. 

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen what internal links are and how they can help your website. Internal links are necessary for a website's SEO and can make it get a higher ranking on search engines. 

However, you must follow the best internal linking practices to achieve this goal. You can get users' attention and traffic on your website only when you have a robust internal linking structure.