A Comprehensive Guide on Building Internal Links

When you hear the term “link-building” your mind probably drifts instantly to backend, SEO, or external links. There is another type of link building that requires your immediate attention: internal link building.

Building internal links is a fantastic way to direct link equity through your website, which makes them an integral part of a successful SEO. The page that is directly linked will benefit the most, but through internal linking, some of that value can be passed along to other web pages. Internal link building aids with growing the trust and authority of pages that are not as linkable. Internal linking simply links a page on a website to another page on the same website – easy as pie!

The best part of internal linking is you only need to build the one internal link thereafter your converting page will continuously benefit from each backlink. Internal links just need to be contextually relevant to whichever page you link them to. Before launching an external linking campaign, first leverage your internal links to highlight your most important pages. The more internal links that point to a page, the more important SEO bots will think that page is.

Internal linking is a great way to boost page views and help the users browsing your page to navigate quickly to other parts of your website that you would like targeted. When used strategically, internal links can significantly boost a website’s performance in search engines. Search engines use internal links to discover new and exciting content. Internal link building is not just about quantity, although the more of them you have the better your page ranking increases, it is about the quality of the links you build. Too many of the same type of internal links, like duplicate linking and non-contextually relevant links can lead to unnatural and low-quality internal links and you DO NOT want that!

If you think of your website like a triangle, the least important content on the bottom and the most important content right on the top. Most website’s most important page at the top of that triangle would be their homepage, and rightly so. Underneath the homepage, the next ranking pages would be in order of importance; About Us, Contact Us, Blog, Services, and the like. The level beneath that would be the individual product pages, each individual blog post etc. Having all these pages link to each other is not a good idea, relevance must be at the forefront of your mind when creating your internal links.

A better approach here would be to group together topically related pages via your internal links. The benefit of employing this internal linking strategy is that it provides your users with a more comfortable and efficient navigation of your website. Unless you have created your website from scratch, this may require an audit of the pre-existing internal links. You can never be too sure that your content linking is fine-tuned the way you want it and simultaneously check for broken links that may require fixing or removing.