Internal Linking For SEO: 21 Actionable Tips, Strategies, and Comprehension

It helps Google to understand relationships between pages and you can direct users to related pages. It is highly recommended for linking to the most relevant, unique, and important stuff, and creating that 'sitemap' of entities and topic clusters, using relevant (keywords) link text where possible, to have a successful internal linking strategy.
Internal Linking —
Internal linking is crucial for SEO because it helps search engines crawl and understand the hierarchy and structure of a website. It also helps distribute page authority and improve user experience by guiding visitors to relevant and related pages on a website. It is as important as the routes to any city. They are that much important, without a route map, you cannot reach the real destination. It's the most important factor that can be directly affected by website owners. In my case, I always try to link a minimum of 2 existing pages that have something related to the content to the new page. And vice versa from the page. Whenever I have a guest on the ProBlogBooster, when I ask them to rank their number one SEO strategy, 9 times out of 10, it's internal linking. This helps me in ranking a high traffic and difficult keyword on a new site with just proper internal linking. So an internal linking strategy is essential to a strong SEO strategy.

What is internal linking?

Internal linking is the practice of adding links of related content from the same website so that the user gets more info and the search engine gets more authority content. I add keyword-driven contextual links between related pages. They did much better to drive more traffic and so high rankings in SERP as a result of adding them.

What is the importance of internal linking?

The importance of internal linking in SEO is hidden in the definition of internal Link: "A link on a website that points to other pages on the site" It means it sends Google to crawl other pages of your site that improve SEO.

How internal linking is critical for SEO?

For every website to rank higher on Google, internal linking is essential. It gives your viewers options for more reading. It aids in raising your ranking for particular keywords. You can use it to market activities and other compensated services.

How many internal links should you have in your page?

You shouldn't have more than 20 internal links on any page of your site and I think that includes links listed in menus and footers as well.

21 Tips for Optimizing your internal link structure

In my experience, internal links have a huge impact on driving more traffic and having more popularity. The number of internal links and the anchor text of each link has a lot of value. It helps google to understand your web architecture & it improves your SEO efforts.

Listed most effective 21 actionable tips, strategies, and tools for internal linking:

1. Helps identify content

Internal links are vital in SEO since Google uses them to understand the content value and identify relevance.

2. Orphan pages & SEO

Building smart internal links enable search engines to find, crawl, and index your pages and rank them accordingly. It helps you prevent orphaned pages that are not published on your website.

3. Fixing orphaned pages

Low-quality orphaned or unrelated pages and posts don’t get crawled and indexed due to other SEO signals. Moreover, building internal links lets you transfer PageRank to other valuable pages on the site. It helps low-impact pages build authority and rank higher on SERPs.

4. Internal links as a ranking factor

Internal linking is key for any website that wants higher rankings in Google.

• It provides your audience with further reading options.
• It helps to improve your ranking for specific keywords.
• It can help you to promote events and other paid services.
• It helps Google to crawl the site effectively.
• Internal link from authoritative pages passes link juice.
• It helps Google in locating, understand, and list important pages.

5. Build authority and credibility

Internal linking is just as important as any other aspect of SEO, they help search engines to determine and index pages by building authority and credibility for a page.

6. Discoverability and readability

Then there's also the part where it helps in discoverability. Internal linking is the practice of linking to related content and pages from the same website so the reader can discover and find more info causing more readability.

7. Cautions against using too many internal links

Internal linking is really necessary but requires you to use them judiciously because you shouldn't have more than 20 internal links on ANY page of your site (and I think that includes links in menus and footers as well). So choose to link to pages that are truly important or relevant to the page you're linking from.

8. Reducing high bounce rate

Not just for SEO but require for added user experience and increasing engagement rate, thereby reducing high bounce rate. If your content is as valuable as you think, and you interlink related content higher chances are the user will read more. A good internal linking structure can improve bounce rate and other metrics

9. Boost content visibility

Linking to your internal pages indicates that you want users to find those pages you are linking to. Therefore search engines always consider pages with lots of internal links to be more important, which of course, benefits your website’s SEO.

10. Build link architecture

Internal links are important, they help search engines understand and rank the website better. By giving search crawler links to follow along with descriptive anchor text, you can indicate to the search bot which pages of your site are important, as well as what they are about. Moreover, specifically, it helps Google understand your pages better so it should be done correctly to drive more organic traffic from Google.

11. PageRank

Depends on the size of the site and incoming links (more authority to spread around). But it can be a game-changer. This is all based on very outdated knowledge of PageRank and loses correlation, so you need to keep an eye on Google Algorithm updates specially in case of internal linkings.

12. On-page SEO

It is the most effective on-page ranking factor and so many SEO professionals believe internal linking is vital to optimizing the website for a search crawler. I consider internal linking as one of the most important implements in my SEO tool list.

13. High search rankings

Internal links help search bots to find, index, and understand all of the pages and their content from your site. In short; internal linking is key for any site that wants higher rankings on Google.

14. Link optimization per site size

Alongside correctly enabling crawling/indexing, it's usually the most important "optimization" you can have. (Note: Internal link optimization is Relative - the bigger the site, the more influential it tends to be. Tiny sites generally benefit less)

15. Internal linking issues

No matter the size of a site, the issues attached to internal links have always been missed. Remember that site owner manage their internal links completely, including all the link attributes where things like link titles and link descriptions are forgotten or ignored.

16. Content and relationship

I must say, Google wants to know two things with respect to links:

1. Do you respect your own content? (INTERNAL LINKS)
2. Do you respect authoritative content from peers? (OUTBOUND LINKS).

So how much onsite internal content linking do you optimize that much value search engines give to what links say.

17. Add value for people

Where internal links add value to the human experience at the site, they're worth using. Google has been telling us since the beginning there's only one guide to follow: 'Add Value for People.'

18. Boost engagement

Internal linking exposes the visitor to other portions of the site and keeps them engaged on the site. It will keep the user hooked and crawlers crawl fast. It helps establish an information hierarchy, which also makes the user experience better and increases engagement.

19. Authority

The benefits of internal linking are infinite but page authority and so domain authority are the major important parts of having internal links.

20. Search bots crawl your site faster

Isn’t that the purpose of the search console? Google will count it & crawl it. If Google can't crawl the URL from another URL on your site, then the crawler can't find it, therefore, it won't index it and so it won't get ranked. You can submit URLs in the search console or in sitemaps. But having internal links is important as you cannot submit URLs manually for large websites. With internal links, you reveal to search engines that this page is important & should be crawled ASAP. So it's very important to help the secondary and tertiary pages to be discovered on your site.

21. Want More Link Juice?

Interlinking help passes the link juice within the website and helps to rank the pages on SERPs.

Video: How to Use Internal Links to Rank Higher in Google

Bottom Line

It's one of the most important aspects of SEO. It is highly recommended in order to transfer PageRank to other pages but it needs to do it correctly.

After all the above points, it is clearly seen that internal linking is very important because it assists Google and other search engines in finding, indexing, and understanding content from every page on your website. It can also help important pages receive a maximum rating (also defined as PageRank) if you apply them wisely and rightly.