Internal Links are the links that goes from a page from your own site to another page to your own site. Think of them as arrows connecting the different pages of a website.
The pages that gets more internal links, hence more internal link juice, will be seen as more important pages in site, some SEOs call them pillar content, or focus pages.
In most cases the homepage is the page that gets the most internal and external links, so linking to a few focus pages from homepage can go a long way in helping boosting their rankings.
Internal Links vs. External Links
As apposed to external links, internal links are within the same site.
Both Internal and external links pass link juice or link equity but internal links are easier to manage as you have full control over them.
Optimizing the Internal link structure of a site can help it gain quick SEO ranking improvements, what is called Quick SEO Gains or Quick SEO Wins.
External links are also very important as backlinks is and has been always one of the most important factors in Google’s ranking system but they are more difficult to build.
Using Tools to Improve Internal Linking
There are a lot of tools that help you analyze, audit, manage and improve your website’s internal linking structure, one of the first tools and most advanced ones is Twylu, the number one internal linking tool founded by Martin Hayman, an SEO best seller author and speaker.
One aspect of the internal links that make them so much valuable in terms of improving the rankings of a website is that you can use them to forward link juice you receive from external links on a few specific page to the pages that you want to rank higher.
How to Pass Link Equity with Internal Links
This means that if you have a page that receives naturally external links from quality sites, say for example you provide a free tool that people naturally link to it, you can link from that page to other pages even new pages that you add to your site to quickly increase their link equity and help them gain more rankings on Google.
In general, I believe that Internal links are one of the low hanging fruits when it comes to the SEO optimization of the websites. The only thing you would need is a tool that can automate the audit and analysis part and identify new link opportunities for interlinking.
One thing that should be remembered is that navigational links (site-wide links from header and footer of the site, like menu links) are considered internal links and are often easy to create.
However, the contextual links that you can link from body of the different pages with relevant anchor text are highly valuable in terms of improving the internal linking structure of the site.
Types of Internal Links
In that manner we can say that there are two types of internal links
- Navigational Internal Links: These include menu links, footer links, recent posts links, related post links, etc.
- Contextual Internal Links: This includes the links that comes from textual content of the site and link to other relevant pages of the site.
And you need both of these links to improve your website’s internal link profile.
Best Practices for Internal Linking
Internal links are specially important for new pages that you add to the site, the reason is that new pages usually lack link authority and if you can add a few links from other pages of the site, it can quickly boost their chance of appearing higher on Google search results when they get indexed by Google.
The different pages of the site to be interconnected in a balanced way without any page being excessively linked or pages left with no links. Focus pages, this could be your services pages or your BoFu pages, as well as your homepage should naturally receive the most links and the best of them.
Anchor text variation is also important. Just like external links, optimizing and using the right anchor text can help the internal links between the pages work more effective.
What to Avoid in Internal Linking
Remember that too much optimization for internal linking like any other aspect of SEO can back fire. I also highly recommend not using the automated internal linking tool that automatically insert links to the different pages of the site in bulk with less control in where those links will be placed and their context and relevancy.
Also be aware that internal linking tools that generate AI content to be inserted in articles so that you can create links from those paragraphs to other relevant pages should be avoided.
The reason is that you should avoid diluting the quality if your content with generic AI-created content just for the purpose of adding a few internal links to a page that originally does not qualify to be used to place an internal link in.
