If your domain is facing problems with its reach, chances are that you are looking past a few things. In most cases, the major issue is the lack of internal linking. It is easy to get too focused on external or backlinks. Internal links when used correctly can significantly boost your content as well as your entire domain.

So What Are Internal Links? 

These are hyperlinks to pages on your website. This allows Google to understand your link structure, improving your site’s searchability. You can also use internal links to highlight the more important articles on your website. This raises their chance of showing up after a search even further. There is no harm in a bit of self-promotion after all.

While the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about link building may not be internal links, they are a building block of effective SEO. 

Importance Of Internal Linking For SEO

Harness Link Equity

A major benefit of internal linking is its ability to harness link equity across a website.

Outbound links improve the equity, authority and, trustworthiness of your site, as well as of the page that is linked. It is mainly the page that is directly linked that benefits from a backlink. Internal links can help transfer some of this “link juice” to other web pages.

Essentially, internal links can help improve the trust and authority of your less linkable, lower-funnel pages, and provide a boost to your new pages. 

It is generally hard to earn backlinks for converting pages as they offer hardly any value and pander a particular audience (people ready to purchase your product). Fortunately, internal linking fixes this problem.

All that is required is creating an internal link that directs to your less-linkable “money page.” So every time your website’s link-worthy asset earns a backlink, the value of that page will improve too. However, it is important to make sure that the placement of the internal link fits the context. 

Help Crawlers Navigate Through Your Site

The structure and architecture of your site is an important determining factor in how crawlers travel and understand your web pages and content. A smart internal structure will help them determine the key pages of your website. 

If a significant number of internal links direct to a single page means the search engine bots will have more importance for that page. This influences the phrases and keywords they associate with these pages.

So for instance, if several pages are covering a similar subject, the bots will determine which page is the most worthy, through internal links, to show up in the results. 

Helps Readers Navigate the Website

If you want to improve the navigation experience of your site’s readers, internal links are the answer. They help create a strong UX, making sure people stay longer on your website. 

Determine from where people generally enter your site and then plan out how you are going to make them navigate across your website via internal links. 

Internal link building can not only improve the organic visibility of a converting page but also direct your site’s visitors to that page for conversion. 

Internal Linking Strategies

Link building helps a lot and has a ton of benefits. Putting it to work can still be a bit tricky nevertheless. To help you out, we are going to highlight some of the best internal linking techniques for you. These will benefit your site the most: 

Link building tools

Link building tools are important because they let you outline how your internal links are organized. They are helpful in long term practices as well.

It starts with planning where to plug your internal links. And link building tools allow you to figure out pages where external links are most concentrated on your domain. This helps in locating your top tier internal links. 

These could be done without the aid of tools of course. You could check your pages for internal links yourself. However, these tools will provide you with a much faster way to do that. Your domain can receive the best possible traction this way. 

Anchor text

This text is the visible text you click on that has a hyperlink embedded to it. This redirects you to a different page or domain. 

You have to be as specific as you can be when it comes to internal linking. Exact match anchor text, something an SEO professional would be against in most cases, is something they would recommend in the case of internal links. These anchors reflect the page that they are linking too.

These links set up a web of your domain that helps crawled better understand and navigate through it. This makes your content more accessible by search engines. This is why you should use the most relevant anchor text possible. One should be able to understand where the embedded hyperlink is trying to take them. 

Keep it Simple 

These links do benefit your domain in a ton of ways, but you shouldn’t be overusing them either. You do not want to lose engagement by stagnating your page with links.

There isn’t a limit to how many links you can embed on a site. So you have to figure out the most appropriate level of links yourself. If you think placing a certain link would help both your domain and your viewer, then don’t hesitate to embed that link. 

The number of links varies depending on your content, though as a general rule of thumb 5 to 10 links are enough. Again, you will have to trust your judgment and make sure you do not end up hindering any user’s experience. 

Final Thoughts

Optimizing the structure of your website through internal links will ensure improved authority and trust for pages across your website, clearer structural hierarchy, and easier navigation for search crawlers and humans alike.