Internal Links Are More Important Than You Think

A lot of attention is given to external link-building campaigns, implementing researched keywords into content, and writing quality articles and copy when considering optimizing your website. Although all these facets of digital marketing are important and extremely useful, you’ll do yourself a disservice if these are the only aspects of SEO optimization that you focus on.

Marketers can use plenty of techniques and activities to improve their websites that go beyond these core practices, with one of the best-overlooked methods being internal linkInternal links are links that connect different pages on your website. They help users navigate your site and make it easier to find information,link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs..

What Are Internal LinksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages.?

Internal links can simply be defined as hyperlinks that, when clicked, direct the user from one page on your domain to another. The majority of websites are already using internal links. In fact, you can’t build a functional multi-paged website without them. However, when focused on and optimized for SEO, they can become a huge asset and can contribute to sizable growth in key metrics that help your website perform better in the SERPs. Internal links are increasingly important, but it can be hard to understand exactly why that’s the case.

So Why Are They Important?

In a nutshell, internal links are vital to your website as they prove to Google that certain pages actually exist, as Google uses these links to discover new content. Think of these internal links as a pathway that Google travels through to navigate the web. If you have a webpage that is void of any internal links and doesn’t feature on your sitemapA site map is a list of pages on your site and their relative importance. Use sitemaps to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for, and to ensure that search engines can find all the information they need., then Google has no way of traveling to that page and discovering it. It means that the Google bots won’t know it exists, and having pages that Google doesn’t know exists is definitely not recommended for your SEO.

These webpages that have no internal links directed to them are known as orphan pages, and it’s important to audit against them and multiple other link-building issues regularly to ensure that your SEO is as good as it can possibly be.

Poorly optimized internal links don’t just affect your SEO by creating undiscoverable pages; they can also affect your PageRank and how that flows around your website. In a general sense, the more internal links a page has, the higher its rank. These links signify that it’s an important one within your website; however, you also need to be cautious that these links are of high value. You don’t just want to dump an obscene number of links on a page to try to boost its rank.

When building internal links, you want to take time to make sure that the anchor textAnchor text is the text highlighted by a hyperlink. The words highlighted are crucial for SEO, informing Google’s crawling bots about the content of the site linked to. used for these links is good and well optimized, too, as Google uses these to gain context and an understanding of what each page is about. You want to utilize keywords in your hyperlinked text, as this can help your page’s chances of ranking for that keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business.. Making these keywords flow naturally in your copy isn’t an easy task, and you don’t want them to feel tacked on as this can be detrimental. That’s why many people use external services that can provide quality content writing that implements these keywords seamlessly, helping to maximize your content and SEO.

How To Build Internal Links Properly

Once you understand the best way to map out your content and your webpages, creating effective internal links is pretty easy and simple. The first thing that you need to understand is that there is a hierarchy in terms of the importance of your webpages. You want your most valuable pages to be at the top of the hierarchy. Think of your website and its multiple pages as a pyramid; you want the vital pages you desire to see the most traffic at the top of the pyramid and the less vital pages towards the bottom.

For the majority of websites, the most important page that should see the most amount of traffic is their homepage. Then under this top tier are some of your most important content, such as services, about us, product descriptions, and other pages. Below this are then lesser important pages such as blog posts and the link. This means that when creating a website and connecting it with internal links, you need to think carefully about which pages are the most important to you.

Once you’ve decided on your ideal structure, you then need to go about adding links in a manner so that the importance is replicated in the PageRank. The common way people go about this is to link their top-tier pages together and their bottom-tier pages with other bottom-tier pages. This can end up being a huge mistake as you need to think about context before making these links. The links need to remain relevant, and the best way to do that is through siloing.

How To Siloing Your Website

The art of siloing is grouping your content together via topically-related webpages through your internal links. In essence, you want to create a cluster of pages that match up to each other thematically, as this will improve the relevance of your links. Here’s an example:

Imagine you have a website dedicated to different domesticated animals and the different breeds of those animals, with some example pages being:

• Dogs
• Labrador
• Corgi
• Poodle
• Cats
• Persian
• Siamese
• Bengal

With these pages, it’s clear that they fall into two distinct categories, with the first being pages about a particular animal and the second being pages about the breeds of these different animals. This means that you’ll want to silo your pages in the following way:

Dogs & Cats are on the same higher tier, with the dog page having links to the different breeds like Labrador, Corgi, and Poodle on a tier below. Simultaneously, the cat’s page parallels this and has links to breeds such as Persian, Siamese, and Bengal. The animal pages act as the hub and link to related pages about the specific breeds. This creates a topic cluster which is a group of highly interlinked pages that are all closely related.

There are many benefits of doing this:

• Users will have an easier time navigating the site, boosting your UX in the process
• Crawlers such as Google will understand your site structure in a much easier way
• More authority is transferred to your hub pages due to the number of subpages that link back to it

However, siloing your pages is not enough to ensure that you have a well-optimized website with perfect internal links. You also need to go through a heavy audit to ensure that your links are operating at their maximum.

How To Audit Your Internal Links

Auditing your internal links can be a tricky process due to the wide array of different issues that can befall them. The best option when auditing is to get an external agency to audit your website on your behalf, as they’ll be able to be extremely thorough and, importantly, know how to deal with any issues that might come up. You can also go one step further than this and get an agency to conduct an entire technical SEO audit, where, as well as your internal links, they’ll look over all aspects of your SEO to ensure that it’s fully optimized.

However, just sticking to internal links for the time being, here’s a look at some of the different issues that an internal link audit will be able to identify and fix.

Broken Internal Links

Broken internal links are links that don’t lead to an existing page, resulting in a redirect or a 404 error. These links can exist after a website goes through a substantial change and can be really bad for your SEO as it wastes link equity and provides a poor user experience. The best way to fix these broken links is to either reinstate the link if the URL it’s trying to link to still exists or change it so that it links to an existing page. If there isn’t one that’s relevant, then it’s best to remove the link.

Links To Redirected Pages

Having a link that is redirected to a different page isn’t always an issue providing that the page it does link to is relevant; however, if it isn’t, it needs to get fixed pronto as it can cause confusion for both users and Google as it crawls through these links to gain an understanding of your pages. Even if the page is relevant, it’s always a good idea to re-do this link so that it removes the time-consuming link hop to make things a bit more streamlined.

Links To Unimportant Pages

Having an unimportant page that should be lower down in your tier system and have a lot of links towards them is a bad thing to discover. It can skew your hierarchy and detract traffic away from your more crucial pages. It’s always best to redistribute these links to more suitable pages if it’s possible.

Final Thoughts

Internal links are vitally important; no one has ever disputed that. However, they go beyond simply making your website more interactive and navigable for users. Internal links are vital in making your website understandable via Google and can really help it rank and go well in the SERPs. Grouping your content together via relevancy can help boost page authority and more, so ensure that you utilize internal links properly and think about where they’re going to lead.