Most SEO services include internal linking. This is the act of creating links between pages on your website. It is easy to implement internal linking strategies and they are crucial to your SEO success.

You can create a hierarchy on your website, drive traffic to your entire site and encourage your visitors to spend more time at your site by adding internal links.

Search engines also use internal linking. Google and Bing search engines crawl websites via internal links. Search engines will be able to better understand your content if you use anchor text and internal links strategically.

There are many types of internal links that you can use.

• Navigation Links: These links are the most popular type of internal link. They create a structure on your website and help the user navigate through the content. Every page on your website should have navigation links.

• Editorial Links: Editorial links are links that are embedded within the body of your website. These links are best incorporated into your website content organically and can be the most valuable for your site.

• Categorical and taxonomy links: These links link together common topics such as blog categories or related posts to make it easier for users to find content. These links can also link to parent service pages.

• Footer (or site-wide) links: These links are located at the bottom or your webpage and help to improve the usability of your site. A site’s footer usually contains contact information, social media widgets and an internal search tool.

Why is Interior Linking Important?

Four key benefits of internal linking include:

Establishing a Hierarchy

Interior linking creates connections and a clear hierarchy among content pages on your website so that users and search engines can find your most important content. You will choose links to be included on your homepage that are higher up the hierarchy and more authoritative.

Link Equity Development

Internal linking can help your pages build link equity. The link equity you build when your pages have links from authoritative pages is enhanced by the relationship they have to the more important one. This link equity allows your most trafficked pages to pass some of their authority onto new pages or pages you wish to have more people see.

Increases crawlability

Google crawlability is enhanced by internal linking, which can drive traffic to your website. Website crawling refers to the process by which software “crawls through” your pages in order to index your site’s content. Search engines will find your site more easily if you add links. This means your website will appear more often in search results.

Improved user experience

Users will be able to navigate your website easily by setting up clear internal links. Users can find the information they need easily and quickly by using internal links.

How to Create the Best Internal Linking Strategy

It is best to have a plan before adding links. These tips will help you create a winning strategy for organizing your links.

Create a Link Tree

To map all pages on your website, create a link tree. This will show you how they relate. This will ensure that each page is within the intended site hierarchy.

Crawl Your Website

To crawl your site, use SEO Frog. The crawl will serve as an audit of the site. It will create a list of all pages on your site, along with information about how many internal links they have. This tool will help you determine how many links are needed to rank pages higher in search engine crawls.

PRO TIP A web crawl audit can also help you to identify crawl errors like 301s or 404s.

Clear Navigation

To link your homepage to the top pages, use user-friendly links that are simple to find and clear. It is easier for users to find the pages they want to see if your navigation is clearer.

You can link related content together

Search engines can contextualize your pages and your website content by linking related content to groups. If you have a page about air conditioning repair on your website, you’ll want to link to it from other pages.

Pass link equity to new or important content

Link equity is transferred from authoritative pages with many backlinks to pages that have less. To identify pages with a lot of backlinks, you can use tools like ahrefs or majestic. Create links to those pages to other relevant content pages.

Use appropriate and keyword rich anchor text

Anchor text, which is usually underlined and blue in your copy, is clickable hyperlink text that links to other pages. Your users and search engines such as Google can understand the type of content they can expect when they click on the link with anchor text. Your anchor text should be carefully chosen. Use keyword-rich phrases to describe the link page. Avoid using the same anchor text on multiple pages. This can confuse crawlers.

Don’t Go Overboard

Too many internal links can not only make your site look unprofessional and cluttered, but can also over-optimize it. Google will penalize a site for having too many SEO-optimization techniques on one site. Google recognizes only the first link or anchor it finds when crawling a page.

Internal linking is an ongoing strategy – check out the links regularly

It is a great practice to increase SEO and user experience by strategically adding internal links to your site.