Internal Linking

While all SEOs focus their energies on backlinks, many overlook optimizing internal linking of the domain. When done strategically, internal linking offers the following benefits:

• It helps search engines understand our website’s structure and build connections between the pages.

• It allows us to pass more link value, and thus more authority, to the most important pages on our website.

• It helps pass ranking power from pages with high-quality backlinks to other pages on the site.

• It helps users navigate through the related pages within our website.

Types of internal links

Internal links can be broadly categorized into two types: navigational internal links and contextual internal links. They both work differently, serving slightly different goals for our website.

Navigational internal links

Navigational internal links appear in the navigation bars, headers, or footers of the website. Navigation bars are especially important for e-commerce websites where there are plenty of categories and product pages. They help visitors find what they’re looking for. Though they add to the user experience, make pages more indexable and help build the site’s structure and hierarchy, they don’t pass PageRank.

Contextual internal links

From an SEO point of view, contextual or body content links are more important than navigational links. These links appear in the body content of the page and point to other relevant content on the website. They help search engines and users build connections between related pages. If the source page has authority, contextual links can pass PageRank to the destination page.

SEO best practices for internal linking, such as those explained throughout the rest of this lesson, are primarily focused on optimizing contextual internal linking.

Internal linking audit

If we’re optimizing an existing website, there will likely be some level of internal linking already in place. The goal is to audit it and build on it. Semrush’s Site Audit tool lets us scan our website and create Thematic Reports, including an Internal Linking Report. The report gives plenty of useful information on the existing internal linking status of the site and insights to improve it. Important things we can assess and fix include:

• Spot orphan pages (those that are not receiving any links).

• Identify pages with weak “Internal LinkRank”.

• Discover broken internal links.

• See if there are too many on-page links.

• Identify the most authoritative pages on the website.

Keeping in mind the existing problems highlighted by our site’s audit report and the SEO tactics discussed next, we can work out a strong internal linking strategy for our website.

SEO best practices for internal linking

Auditing our site’s existing internal linking and building on it is crucial to our site’s SEO. The following best practices underline a robust internal linking structure of a website.

Identify site structure and pillar pages

Internal linking strategy begins by identifying and listing down the most important pages on our website. Typically, these are our pillar pages that target the broad keywords in the topic clusters. These keywords have high search volumes compared to the long-tail keywords targeted by our cluster pages. If our site structure was a triangle (which, ideally, it should be), more important pages sit above the less important ones.

If we have an e-commerce website, our most important content, after the homepage, as our top-level categories, with subcategories and product pages under them. The website’s main navigation menu will also follow the same structure.

The most important pages are, in short, targeted around our main keywords. These are the pages we want our audience to come to when looking for topics our business specializes in. We can tell Google which pages are most important by pointing more links to them.

Linking pillar and clusters

When we’ve identified our site’s hierarchical structure, and the most important pages in it, linking them is easy. The pillar page covers a high-level topic, introducing various sub-topics on which we will have cluster pages. Link out from the pillar page to these related cluster pages. We can directly link these cluster pages from the relevant sentences or phrases on the pillar page.

Each of these cluster pages will link back to the pillar page that they derive from. Cluster pages can also link to other cluster pages. They can also link to other pillar pages, that they may not directly originate from. The context surrounding the link should be relevant.

Anchor text

The anchor text should be relevant to the linked page, but not over-optimized for keywords. Let it appear naturally in the context in a way that it’s clickable to the users. Exact-match internal links are likely not penalized by Google (in contrast to external links), but they can make the text sound unnatural. It’s okay to use keywords in anchor texts, as long as they appear naturally and are relevant to the context. At the same time, add variety to the anchor text. Don’t use the same anchor text for all the links.

Here’s what Google itself has to say [27]:

Limit the number of links

Google recommends limiting the number of links to a “few thousands at most” [28]. Most SEOs recommend keeping the number down to around 100. These will include all the links on the page, including those in the header, footer, navigation bars, ads, and elsewhere.

Google is currently able to crawl pages with thousands of links without truncating. However, Matt Cutts says that users dislike link-heavy pages, and recommends focusing on user experience [29]. While having a bunch of useful, relevant internal links can enhance user experience, going overboard and throwing in tons of links will damage it.

Use authority pages to optimize new pages

As we create new content, we can make use of related old pages to pass authority to the new pages. To find related pages on our website, we can do a simple Google search on our website’s pages in the format: “site: yourdomain.com keyword”. Keywords here are simply the search terms relevant to the new content. Once we have old related posts, link to our new page from these authoritative posts. Don’t forget to link back to these old posts from the new content. This way, the new pages can also benefit from the authority of the old pages.

SEO tools to help internal linking

Avoid using automated link insertion tools since they don’t follow a strategic internal linking strategy. They don’t understand which pages need to be passed PageRank and which pages can they best link from. Also, instead of creating relevant, natural anchor texts, they might create a bunch of exact-match anchor texts that could hurt our site’s SEO.

Instead, there are certain SEO tools that help us understand our website and optimize it through internal linking. These include:

Semrush’s Site Audit

We already discussed this tool earlier in the same lesson. We can keep coming back to it as we build our site’s internal links. It will tell us the progress we’ve made and suggest edits, if necessary.

Semrush’s Backlink Analytics

We already know that we can use the most authoritative pages on our website to pass PageRank to the less authoritative pages. Semrush’s Backlink Analytics will help us identify our site’s pages with the best quality backlinks.

Yoast SEO Premium

With a Yoast plugin in WordPress, we get suggestions for pages on our site that we may link to based on their existing authority and the relevance to the content we are working on.

Ahrefs Site Explorer

This tool helps us spot the pages on a website with the most backlinks and authority. From the list that appears when we enter our domain and open the “Best by links” report, we can select the relevant pages to link from.

Test your knowledge

Choose the best answer for each of the following questions.