Internal Linking Best Practices Step-by-Step Strategy

Following our internal linking best practices you can improve Google rankings for a whole load of different keywords really fast over night.

To ensure this happens, when you add internal links to your pages make sure you have them re-crawled by Google bot. This will make keyword ranking changes happen quickly.

You can get any page that you have changed on your website re-crawled using Google console. Use the URL inspection tool.

When a user clicks on a link on your page, they’ll be sent to another page within the same website or domain, or to another resource like an image, video, or document.

These connections make it simple for readers to move throughout a website. If you want to boost your website’s search engine optimisation, you need to use best practises for internal linking.

The Role of Internal Links in SEO

The Google bot will crawl a website by following both internal and external connections. When the bot accesses a website, it begins at the homepage and follows the first link it finds. By exploring these connections, it learns how various pages on a website are related to one another. Google not only analyses the connections between sites, but also distributes a page’s link value across all of its links.

The homepage of a website is often the page with the most internal links, and hence the highest link value. As the value of the link is sent to subsequent web pages, it will be distributed proportionally across all other links on the site.

The greater the number of connections to a post, the greater its worth. Including relevant internal links throughout your content helps Google understand the organisation of your site. You may use them to create a hierarchy on your site and direct more attention to the most crucial pages or articles. If you want to improve a page or blog post’s search engine rankings, add useful internal links to it.

With the right internal linking strategy, you may boost the number of ranked pages since Google gives more weight to sites that have more links.

Why do we need Link Juice?

One of the most used SEO terms is “link juice.” In this context, “link juice” means the benefits gained by visiting one website after another. As we’ve already established, search engines like Google see links as votes of confidence in the quality and credibility of your website cast by other websites. Creating backlinks may be accomplished in a number of ways, the two most common being internal links and external links.

Let’s pretend Site 1 is linked to by four sites and Site 2 is linked to by two sites. Likelihood is high that a website with more links will rank higher in the search engine results than one with a lower one.

Quantifying the value of inbound links is also important here. Because of this, the proportion of “link juice” that Site 2 receives will be higher than that of Site 1 if Site 2 obtains a link from a site that connects only to Site 2.

When a website has both dofollow and nofollow links, the link value is shared proportionally between the two. You can quickly determine how much link juice a certain site has to give out by using a tool like the Link Whisper Internal Link Juice tool. In order to determine how much “link juice” each link will transfer, this tool counts how many there are on a website. Your website’s link juice works best if it is distributed equally over its many pages.

Motives to Use Internal Links

By now, you should be familiar with how site architecture and link juice are distributed with the use of internal links. Let’s examine the advantages of best practises for internal connections in further detail:

Websites with a well-thought-out system of internal links are far more user-friendly. Anchor links allow you to guide readers to other pages within your site that they will find interesting and useful. If visitors to your site find that the information presented on the pages they were directed to was relevant to what they were looking for, the number of pages they see from your site will grow. New visitors will find content that piques their interest and the site’s conversion rate will rise as a result of this.
Spreading link juice to relevant web sites is an effective strategy for increasing the PageRank of any website. The increased authority and higher rankings of such sites are a direct result of the link juice they have gotten.
Your site’s bounce rate may also be lowered by using internal links. If your readers aren’t interested in what you’ve written, they won’t finish what you’ve posted. Optimising the content with relevant internal links may significantly lower the site’s bounce rate. Your website’s rating will improve as a result of a decreased bounce rate.
It’s true that Google bots will prioritise the most accessible content when crawling your site for indexing purposes, but with well-designed internal linking and navigation, they’ll be able to find their way to the less-frequented pages, too. The presence of such connections may increase the page ranks and, by extension, the website’s overall standing.

The Opinions of Google on Internal Links

The importance of internal links for search engine optimisation has been acknowledged by Google. During one of the office hour meetings, a participant questioned John Mueller whether allowing breadcrumbs was sufficient for internal connections, and Mueller confirmed that it was.

John claims that internal links are “supercritical for SEO” since they are one of the most essential factors in letting visitors and Googlebot know which pages are the most important on a website.

John argues that by using internal links, a website owner may highlight the pages that serve as the site’s foundation, making it easier for both visitors and search engines to find their way around.

John explains why providing an internal link is not the main role of breadcrumbs, but that it is still useful.

He also suggests that webmasters take a more proactive approach to internal linking than just inserting a few links here and there. Instead, he intends to make use of relevant anchor text when creating internal links, which will help both people and search engines comprehend what each link is about.

John also elaborated on the internal links that are included in the document’s header, footer, and body. John was asked whether internal links in the header and footer are treated differently by Google than those in the main body of the page.

John claims that Google gives equal weight to internal links in the header, footer, and body since they all serve the same goal.

The meaning of “crawl depth”

How thoroughly search engines explore a website and index its information is known as its crawl depth. More pages will be indexed from sites that have deep crawls than from those that don’t. To illustrate, search engines will have a harder time indexing a page that requires three clicks to visit than one that can be reached with only one click from the homepage.

Crawl depth includes building internal linkages. If you don’t have any internal links on your site, it will be difficult for search engine spiders to index it. Your internet exposure will suffer as a consequence of lower organic rankings and a smaller percentage of your content getting indexed. Including breadcrumbs that reveal the user’s clickstream to a certain page might improve usability.

When you do a search on Google, the results you get are the sum total of information indexed from numerous websites. You need to optimise your site with all the aspects that impact the Google crawl rate since Google is constantly scanning and indexing web pages to provide the most up-to-date and relevant information to end consumers.

One of them is making sure the site loads quickly, in addition to internal linking. Google will index a website less often if it has a sluggish load time.

The term “internal linking structure” is defined.

Typical website architecture consists of a single homepage with many levels of navigation. However, the structure of certain websites is often more intricate than that of others.

Webmasters used to use the silo method to boost keyword prominence inside a certain category. There is no need for a very intricate plan to develop internal links.

Google’s crawlers use a network of interconnected links to find new sites and add them to its index. The Google crawler will discover and index your newly published material if you have set up your internal links properly.

You may want to reevaluate your site’s internal linking strategy if one of your most significant pages isn’t indexed or if one of your less important pages has too many connections to other parts of the site. That’s the only way to prioritise vital content above fluff. Improving your website’s internal linking structure is as simple as creating a well-organized navigational section with drop-down menus.

Importance of a Levelled Internal Linking Structure

You already know that internal links assist crawl bots in your website structure and make it easy for people to explore your site by creating a hierarchy of content. Because of how simple it is to go about your site, visitors will likely spend more time there.

Customers are more likely to buy from you if you direct them to sites that are likely to convert. If you want to improve your site’s ranking, all it takes is a few tweaks here and there, and a little bit of hard work on your part.

Including internal links as part of on-page SEO may help your site rank higher in search engines like Google and make it easier to browse for your visitors.

Guidelines for Internal Linking Best Practices: Step-by-Step Strategy

Now that you understand why good practises for internal linking are crucial for any website, let’s dive further into the specific steps you should take to implement such practises.

Produce a Lot of Material
To get plenty of inbound connections from inside your site, you need lots of pages of original content. You don’t need to worry about sophisticated layers of content or the silo approach to establish a decent internal linking structure on your website if you have a lot of material already.

Boost your rankings by linking to new content from high-authority pages.
Distributing link authority to the most essential SEO-driven pages of a website is a crucial and successful way, and the Authority Transfer methodology is a key part of doing so. Finding these pages and linking to them within may be done with the help of powerful tools like SEMRUSH. In SEMRUSH, input your domain to Identify Your Site’s Pillar Pages (Your Site’s Authority Pages) using the Semrush Backlink Analytics tool. Your pages with the most quality external backlinks have a lot of link juice, you can pass this around your site through internal linking.

Put Your Target Keywords in the Anchor Text.
To stay consistent with the topic of your article, internal links to photos should make use of anchor text rather than the images themselves. Make sure the alt tags accurately explain each image before using them as links. To prevent having your links appear like spam, use natural, unoptimized phrase fragments as anchor texts (alt tags).

Substantial Connections
There are specifically two kinds of internal connections that you shouldn’t create. Creating inbound connections to your site’s landing page is step one. There are likely to be many links already leading to your homepage, so rather than adding more, you should concentrate on improving internal pages by interlinking them.

Another error often made by marketers is including a link to the “Contact Us” page as a call to action (CTA) at the conclusion of their articles. Unless absolutely essential, this isn’t something you should do. These pages are often linked to from the main navigation bar on the homepage; thus, you should avoid connecting to them and focus on referring to internal pages instead.

Make Sure All Links Are Surrounded by Content
An improved user experience is an internal linking strategy’s main goal; anything else is a bonus. Google gives more weight to sites that prioritise the user experience.

In this way, the inclusion of internal links in a piece of content signals to the user that the connected web pages are relevant to the article’s subject matter.

Therefore, it benefits both you and the intended audience. Effective internal linking provides readers with access to additional content while also increasing your site’s search engine rankings.

Make Internal Links That Make Sense
As has been emphasised throughout the text, a well-linked internal navigation system contributes to a positive user experience and a higher search engine rating. It’s important to use discretion when generating internal links and make sure the linked page is relevant to the one you’re linking from.

Take a hypothetical online motorbike store where one of the pages discusses the merits of using electric bikes. You may add a link to a product page selling electric bikes to this page, but you may not add a link to a product page selling petrol power scooters to this page.

Limit the number of in-content links you use reasonably.
Too many meaningless internal links might confuse visitors. The maximum amount of internal connections that a website may have is unknown. Between two and five links may be included in a single post, depending on its length. Five internal links are adequate for a 1500-word article. In addition, the links shouldn’t be clumped together and should be dispersed naturally throughout the text.

Prevent Adding Links to Your Site’s Footer
This was standard procedure only a few years ago, but those days are long gone. The bottom of holiday type websites used to be a prime place for keyword-rich internal links.

The number used to rise over 50. In 2013, an algorithmic penalty for these footer links in SEO was implemented. Avoid adding extra links to your footer in 2023 in the hopes of improving search engine rankings; Google will likely see this practise as spam.

Avoid Using the Same Anchor Text on Two Separate Pages
Using the same anchor text on two separate pages might mislead Google and cause it to believe that the pages are duplicate content. To that end, it’s important that anchor texts on web sites be as clear and precise as possible.

Prioritise the placement of links.
Longer user engagement and lower bounce rates may be achieved with strategically positioned internal links at the top of a page. An internal link placed at the very beginning of an article gives readers instant gratification in the form of a suggested read. They’ll be compelled to stay on your site for far longer. Even though you should sprinkle your internal links throughout the page’s content, it doesn’t harm to have one or two at the very top.

To aid in indexing, use in-content links.
In most cases, Google will find and index all of a website’s crucial pages. If you have a large number of pages on your site and use up your crawl budget, Google may only be able to index a subset of them.

Following recommended practises for internal linking makes it simpler for search engines to identify and index your site’s pages, even those deep inside its structure.

Why Refrain from Automating Internal Links?

For several reasons, automating internal links should be avoided. Internal linking WordPress plugins and tools don’t always have the most up-to-date information regarding which pages should get the most link value. More than a thousand instances of the same anchor text for different web pages may be generated by link automation on bigger websites. Search engines like Google might mark your site as spam if you do this. In addition, automated link building technologies will never be able to put themselves in the shoes of the end user and create relevant internal links in the same way an SEO professional can.

Conclusion

Adhering to these best practises for internal linking makes it easy to enhance your site’s internal linking structure without adding unnecessary complexity or sacrificing your site’s user-friendly layout.

The SEO of your site may be greatly improved if you adhere to standard practises for internal linking and do so consistently across the board.