Internal Links For SEO: The Beginner’s Guide
If you want to generate more traffic from Google, you need to master the various factors that help improve your search rankings, which leads to more website visitors.
One of them is internal links.
In fact, this link type is one of the most underrated components of an effective SEO campaign.
This guide will help you better realize the value they bring to ranking your website and how you can devise a solid internal linking strategy to turn this into reality.
Let’s get into it.
What are internal links?
Internal links refer to hyperlinks from a page pointing to another page on the same domain.
They differ from external links, hyperlinks pointing to a web page from a different domain or website.
Types of internal links
Where and how you link to your site pages can determine the effectiveness of your internal links from an SEO standpoint. Below are the most popular types:
Navigational
Navigational links are important as they are the most visible and prominent links on your site due to their placement and position.
You can find these links in the navigational menu on top of both (just below the logo or site name). Some are nested under a primary topic, so you must hover over them to view the links.
The sidebar, which commonly appears on a blog post’s right (or left) side, can be considered a navigational section of your site. You can also find links that don’t appear on the navigational menu.
Contextual
These are arguably the most important internal links in SEO because they are found in the most crucial part of the page: the content body.
The surrounding text helps introduce the link’s topic, which helps search engines better understand the page being linked to in the content and its relationship with the current page.
Breadcrumbs
You can find breadcrumbs above the fold and just above the page title.
These are very useful for ecommerce websites because they help categorize your products according to type. So, when visitors want to browse other products of the same type, they can refer to the breadcrumbs to view them.
Footer
The footer section is where you link to important pages on your site, similar to the navigational menu.
Visitors may have missed these links from the nav bar, so it’s good to have them here, just in case.
The footer section also includes links to boilerplate pages on your site, such as Terms of Services, Privacy Policy, Contact, and others. It may also include links to your social media profiles.
The benefits of internal linking
Internal links get your website visitors to go to other pages.
Optimizing your internal link structure by using the most suitable types and linking to the most relevant pages enables visitors to engage with your site more and keep them in it longer.
For instance, featuring your most important pages on the menu allows a lot of your visitors to check them. Conversely, adding related posts within the content body or at the bottom of each blog post helps them learn more about the topic that interests them.
Just as important, internal links can help improve your site’s SEO performance.
Search engines discover and learn more about your site pages from your internal links. They start from your homepage and identify the links pointing to other pages on your site. Only after they’ve crawled these pages can search engine crawlers index them on search results so your site can generate organic traffic.
These links also help distribute “link juice” or “link equity,” previously known as Google PageRank, across your website’s pages.
By building internal links pointing from your top-ranking pages on search engines, you help pass the authority of these pages to other less popular pages on your website. And by receiving this link juice, these pages can improve their keyword rankings on organic search results and generate more traffic in the process!
Finally, developing a proper internal linking strategy builds your site’s topical authority, which refers to how semantically relevant your website is to its main topic.
For example, a fitness website should extensively cover topics about exercise, diet, lifestyle, and tech and equipment, to name a few. All these topics help inform Google about your site’s commitment to fitness. This, in turn, helps your pages rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is how topical authority ideally works. However, creating well-written content that observes semantic SEO practices is just half of the battle.
The other half is making sure that relevant content links to each other in a logical manner. This means organizing articles and pages according to topic clusters and keeping the internal links within the same topical cluster.
We will learn more about these things as we proceed in this guide. However, the most important thing to take away from internal links is how they satisfy both search engines and visitors when done correctly.
How to develop a successful internal linking strategy
At this point, you want to learn how to create and implement a sensible internal linking approach so your website can enjoy its numerous SEO benefits.
This section will cover how you can create different internal link types throughout your site pages to improve website engagement and make search spiders’ crawling of your website easier. Let’s begin!
Visualize your site architecture
Your website is like a web of interconnected pages about certain topics. This is where search engine “spiders” got their name from – they crawl through your site by moving from one section to another through the threads of internal links you’ve built.
Therefore, you need to visualize your site when building internal links if you haven’t yet.
For brand-new sites, you can start by using a mind-mapping tool like Coggle.
The free account is good enough to help you determine which pages will be linked from your homepage and which pages or posts will branch out from which.
Only once you’ve mind-mapped your site’s internal linking structure can you start implementing the links individually.
If you have an existing site that’s been up for years, using an SEO audit tool is the best way to visualize it.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a website visualizer that shows your site structure.
Whether you’re developing your internal linking structure or gathering data from your site’s current structure, you must ensure that all pages only need as few clicks as possible, which is called click depth.
Let’s say you linked to an article from a landing page with a link from the homepage. This means that the article has a click depth of two because it requires two clicks from the homepage before search spiders get to it.
The goal is to achieve a flat site architecture with minimal click depth, which will make your pages much easier for search spiders to crawl and index in search results.
In essence, the greater the click depth, the more difficult it will be for search engine bots to crawl the page. This means they might be unable to index your page properly on SERPs for your keyword!
Using this information, you need to find ways to link pages with a click depth of four or higher closer to your homepage.
The solution will depend on the type of site you have (publication, ecommerce, SaaS, etc.), so there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. But once you have a list of pages that you need to bring closer to the homepage, the answer will become much clearer soon as you keep reading.
Note: Click depth is the number of clicks that a page is from the homepage. Fewer is better. You especially want your priority pages to be as close to the homepage as possible.
Identify your site’s pillar pages
A potential solution to optimizing your site architecture is to create topical maps, which are designed to improve your website’s topical authority and increase its search rankings.
In a nutshell, this concept requires you to cluster pages about the same topic by building internal links to their respective clusters. That means no pages from different clusters should link to each other.
However, for your topical map to work, you must identify the pillar page for each group. This serves as the page optimized for keywords about the main topic.
Pillar pages usually take the form of product, service, or category pages for e-commerce sites and agencies. For publication sites, in-depth how-to guides can serve as a cluster’s pillar page.
If you don’t have one yet, you must first search for the best keyword to target for the page.
If your site is about yoga, for example, a potential pillar page for one of its clusters is the poses (asanas).
SE Ranking’s keyword research feature can help you find a keyword to optimize for this page, particularly one with a high search volume and low difficulty.
Click here to get a free trial of SE Ranking.
Link pillar pages on navigation and footer sections
Increase visibility on these pages for users. Also link to these pages on your sidebar section.
Once you’ve created the page for this target keyword, link to it from your homepage, preferably in the navigational menu and the content body, for maximum visibility.
Identify and create supporting articles for pillar page
Next, you must create and link to supporting articles from your pillar page.
They help provide pillar pages with additional context to search engines about what your site is about.
By creating many informative articles that support your pillar page, you provide your target audience and search engines with content showcasing your expertise about the topic. This leaves them with no choice but to rank your content higher on SERPs!
To begin, search the keyword of your pillar page on SE Ranking and click on the detailed report to view all ideas and suggestions.
Click questions to filter the results only to show question keywords for which you can create and optimize articles about the same topic as your pillar page.
While this type of long-tail keyword has a lower search volume, they are less competitive as they are easier to rank for on Google search, making them ideal search queries for your site to target.
Before creating supporting articles targeting the keywords you find here, search your website first. There’s a chance that you have created these articles already and you just forgot about them. In this case, just include them in the topic cluster.
Note: Always check what type of content is ranking for a keyword. You’ll need to mirror the type of content ranking at the top of the search results and create a more useful version with unique insights. It’s got to make sense for Google to rank the content you create.
There are times when you won’t be able to target certain keywords. For example, if you run a content site and search results are full of ecommerce listings, your content is less likely to rank.
Link the pages in the cluster
Once you have the pillar pages and their supporting articles, it’s time to link them together to build your topic cluster.
The best approach is to create contextual links to your articles since they help transfer link juice more effectively to other pages.
The next step is identifying the best way of linking to the different pages and articles in your cluster.
One way to do this is to link all pillar pages and supporting articles within a cluster.
Another approach is to link your supporting articles to the pillar page and vice versa. The supporting articles shouldn’t link to each other.
However, I recommend the reverse silo method by Kyle Roof.
All the supporting pages link to the pillar page and to each other. The only difference here compared to the other content cluster models is that the pillar page links to just one supporting article.
You want to transfer all the link equity to the pillar page, which is where you should generate most of your site’s revenue and income.
So, the more authority the pillar page has, thanks to the incoming internal links from the supporting articles, the higher it’ll rank on Google, and the more traffic and conversions you can get from it!
Use related keywords for anchor texts
Anchor text refers to the words or phrases used to link to a page on your site.
Ideally, you should use the page’s target keyword as its anchor text when linking to it from your other site pages.
However, it is not a good idea to use the same exact anchor text when linking to the page from other pages on your website.
In particular, overusing your anchor text will cause Google to ignore them, according to the May 2024 core algo leak.
So, a good recommendation would be to pull secondary keywords from Google Search Console (GSC) and use them to vary anchor text throughout the site.
From GSC, go to Search Performance and check the queries from which the page generates clicks and impressions.
Use these as anchor texts when linking to the page. This helps you diversify the anchor text used for the page and potentially improves its keyword rankings on SERPs.
The above method would work best for existing content. If your page is fairly new, use SE Ranking instead.
Type in the target keyword in SE Ranking and check for the most relevant suggestions, which you can use as anchor texts.
Set up breadcrumb links
As mentioned, breadcrumbs are a good way for ecommerce site owners to help visitors check out category pages where the products belong. You can also use this for news sites, especially if you cover various topics.
Showing breadcrumbs on your site pages is a tricky proposition, as how you can set it up depends on your content management system (CMS) and the theme or site design you’re using.
If you’re using the Kadence theme, you can go to Appearance > Customize > Post/Pages Layout and select Page Layout. Then, go to the Title Elements section and enable the breadcrumbs for all pages by clicking on the eye icon.
Link to related posts
Another way to engage your readers with your content is to add a Related Posts widget at the end of the article.
Set up the widget to show pages within the same topic to maintain the cluster’s integrity.
You can use many WordPress plugins to display related posts in an article. One of them is the Related Posts plugin from WPBrigade.
You can customize the widget’s style and design to match your brand. You can also change how many posts to show in the widget, whether to include the post thumbnails, and others.
One thing to know about these plugins is that search engines may not crawl the posts featured here if they are dynamically generated using Javascript. This means that the related posts change every time you refresh the page.
This means related posts plugins only affect the user experience and don’t contribute to the site’s topical authority.
That said, you should still consider using this plugin if you want to reduce bounce rate and improve clicks to pages from within your site.
Note: An alternative would be to manually add related links at the end of each article. It’s a bit tedious but offers the best of both worlds. I’d recommend building this into your post-publication checklist.
Perform a link audit
If your site has been around for some time, it may have accumulated internal linking issues you were unaware of.
To be sure, use SE Ranking Site Audit to identify potential technical and on-page problems like website speed and redirects and how to fix them.
Add your site as a project in the dashboard and run a website audit.
Give it a few minutes or hours (depending on how many pages your site has), and you should have an audit report ready to view.
From the report, click on Issue Report and go to Internal Links. This shows you the errors, warnings, and notices you must be mindful of.
This section prioritizes “No inbound links” as a critical issue. Referred to as orphan pages, they don’t have any inbound links pointing to them.
Ideally, if you built your content clusters properly, you shouldn’t have this problem. But if the problem persists, identify these pages and include them in any of your existing clusters or create a new one for them.
Another internal linking issue that the Site Audit can spot is broken internal links.
First, go to the HTTP Status Code section and look for issues in the 4xx HTTP Status Codes, also known as broken pages.
Next, open the drop-down menu to see which pages have this issue and click on the number of referring pages for the linked page you want to fix first.
From here, you should see the pages that are still linked to the broken page. To fix broken internal links completely, edit the links on these pages or link to a working page on your site.
Add more internal links
You might be wondering:
How many internal links can you include in a page?
The content cluster models above show that you have to link to articles in the cluster, which can be limiting.
The types of internal links we discussed above are designed to help you maximize your search rankings and potential traffic.
By limiting the number of links to their essentials, you allow link equity to circulate only to these pages, thereby improving your topical authority over time.
However, this is just one way of looking at it.
Just because we’re recommending this approach doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do things.
So, to answer the questions, yes, you can add as many internal links as you like to your page. And you can link to external sites.
However, you need to set a maximum number that makes sense. Some sites have a limit on the number of links per paragraph. Too many links can look a bit messy.
To help you out here, use a content optimization tool like Frase.
Aside from identifying which natural landing processing (NLP) keywords to include in the content, it also tells you how many words, images, and links to include.
Click here to try Frase for free.
Keep the internal links you’ll include on the page within the number that appears on Frase, and you should be good!
Conclusion
Linking to pages within your site may seem innocuous. However, developing a solid internal linking structure by following the advice above separates websites that generate tons of Google traffic from those that don’t.
Hopefully, this guide has enlightened you on what internal links can do for your website. The next step in your SEO journey is integrating your learnings here as part of your on-page optimization to maximize your organic traffic. Best of luck!