The Importance of Internal Linking

August 28th, 2014 SEO No Comments

You know those champagne towers you see at wedding receptions? Everyone is held in suspense watching the foam splash and cascade down the pyramid of glasses. When it’s over, every glass from top to bottom is brimming with bubbles.

Websites aren’t much different.

What Is Internal Linking?

A website has a hierarchical structure that begins with the home page, and which links to subpages within the website. If you were to visualize the ideal structure of a website, it’d look like a pyramid. These pages connect to each other through internal links.

Internal links may come in the form of options on the main navigation menu, or through text that has been hyperlinked, also known as anchor text.

Why is Internal Linking Valuable?

 

“Trickle Down”

Let’s say you own a popular blog that reviews restaurants in Philadelphia. Your website has become an authority on restaurants in the city because its reviews are insightful, accurate and entertaining. As a result, your site is often linked to by other well-regarded blogs and news sites, and is highly shared on social media. In the eyes of Google, this popularity means your site is valuable to users inquiring about the quality of restaurants in Philadelphia. This is the part where champagne is being poured on the top glass.

In SEO terms, your site is receiving “link juice,” “link equity” or “page rank” from this traction. In laymen’s terms, it means online users love talking about your site and respect your opinion.

In the same way that other well-regarded sites have legitimized your site through external links, and passed on link equity, you can do the same to pages on your own site through internal links. If there are particular articles on your site that have gained credibility in the online community, these will be the most valuable to pages to link from. A link from this page, whether it’s to another site or your own, is seen by Google as a vote of confidence, and will distribute its value.

Improving Crawlability and Navigation

Visualize your website as a town: a network of destinations (or pages), and between those destinations are streets and pathways (or links). If you were trying to get to a specific destination, wouldn’t you benefit from a shortcut? In fact, wouldn’t your experience of the town improve overall if there were more short cuts? Whether you’re navigating in the real world or the virtual one, people appreciate accessibility.

If you include more internal links on your site, its structure can go from this…

Image courtesy of Moz

Image courtesy of Moz

 

To this…

Image courtesy of Moz

The more pathways that exist between destinations, the better the experience of the website will be.

Google appreciates more pathways as well because they make your website more crawlable. When more links exist on your site, Google can find and index them more easily, then serve them up to the appropriate search queries. If a page has no or few links to it, it will be difficult for both you and Google to find it.

How Do I Perform Internal Linking?

There are several ways to make sure your blog has efficient internal linking. It just requires some common sense, a good memory and a few basic skills in advanced search operators.

Use Accurate Anchor Text

As you’re writing your next blog post, or going back and reviewing old ones, be on the look out for moments when you can link to existing posts or pages on your site. For example, if you’re writing a post about your tour of the 10 best food carts in Philadelphia for your restaurant blog, it’d be beneficial to reference previous articles on the site dedicated to reviews of food carts. This would broaden the user’s understanding and extend the amount of time they spend on your site.

Keep in mind, when you implement an internal link, the hyperlinked text is important. This is also known as anchor text, and it should be an accurate and concise representation of the page it links to. Descriptive anchor text will help search engines properly index the article, and give the user a realistic preview of what they’re about to click on. Utilizing anchor text is also key to gaining authority on specific keywords for which you’d like your site to rank.

Do you want to be the go-to source for users inquiring about the quality of tacos at Bob’s Taco Stand? In that case, maybe you’d write the following in your “Tour of the 10 Best Food Carts in Philadelphia” post:

Next stop on our list of the 10 best food carts in Philadelphia is Bob’s Taco Hut. I wrote a review for Bob’s Taco Hut several months ago, and decided to take another trip to see if their tacos maintained the same level of quality.

In the example above, it’d be perfectly appropriate to use the words “review for Bob’s Taco Hut” as anchor text, and link back to the previous review. If an online user is curious about Bob’s tacos and wants to make sure they are a good choice for lunch, isn’t it likely they might type these words into the search bar?

Use Site Search Operators

So you’re writing your post about your tour of the best food carts in Philly, and you feel like something’s missing. There’s more internal links you can include to other articles you’ve written about food carts in the city, but you’re not sure where they are on the site because you’ve written so many. Using site search operators will serve them to you on a platter. Typing in the following would be a direct way to find the content you’re looking for in this case:

site:phillyrestaurantblog.com “food cart” -inurl:phillyrestaurantblog.com/tour-of-the-10-best food-carts-in-Philadelphia

Let’s break this advanced query down, step by step:

site:phillyrestaurantblog.com

Translation: Only show me results from my blog.

site:phillyrestaurantblog.com “food cart”

Translation: Only show me results from my blog that include the phrase “food cart.”

site:phillyrestaurantblog.com “food cart” -inurl:phillyrestaurantblog.com/tour-of-the-10-best food-carts-in-Philadelphia

Translation: Only show me results from my blog that include the phrase “food cart,” but which exclude the original article for which I’m finding links.

The last step is not necessary, but just makes your search results slightly more pure.

What Else Should I Keep In Mind About Internal Linking?

Creating more internal links on your site is a common best practice in SEO, but it’s also a best practice to not overdo it. As a user, would you like to see text saturated with hyperlinks? Let’s see what this would look like with our previous example of text:

Next stop on our list of the 10 best food carts in Philadelphia is Bob’s Taco Hut. I wrote a review for Bob’s Taco Hut several months ago, and decided to take another trip to see if their tacos maintained the same level of quality.

It looks spammy to you and it looks spammy to Google.

In addition, the more internal links on a page, the less value they each pass to the linked page. Internal linking is a resource, so be careful to not deplete it.

Final Words

You might still be asking questions such as “How many internal links should I include on a page?” This article is by no means a comprehensive guide to internal linking, and certainly does not answer all possible questions about the subject.

However, try not to get too caught up in questions like these. There’s a lot of practical and insightful advice about internal linking and SEO in general, but don’t forget about the importance of being objective and knowing your audience. Internal linking is another chance for you to be a guide to your users, and enable them to discover content on your site they may not have otherwise found. Most importantly, be helpful, clear and focused in how you represent information, especially if it’s your information.

In the end, you shouldn’t be answering your questions, you should be answering those of your users.

If you’re interested in further exploring the topic of links, please check out Amplifound’s post on Why Links Matter.

See what I did there? ;)

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