Internal Link Building

Internal links are backlinks in your website that point to another page of your website. Internal backlinks have two important cases used for:

Internal Link Building For Users

First, Internal backlinks are for users. In case you write an article on your website, you can add internal links to your pages for users to guess that they can be interested in exploring more about the details or get additional information about some part, or even the word that appears on that page.

Internal Link Building For Search Engines

Internal links are crucial for search engines. Search Engines like internal links as it is a process of getting some signal about what the page is about from the writer. Of course, Google understands your page even without internal links, but it is an opportunity to give your voice to the Search Engine.

Internal link building can help you with:

• Indexing your pages
• Signaling Google to find and understand your page
• Pass the value of quality backlinks to another page
• Navigating your content
• Create a relationship between pages

In short, without internal link building, your external link building is nothing.

Internal link building is not only linking your pages. Technically, yes, but the philosophy of internal linking is concrete steps.

Step 1: Structuring the website

When you structure your website, you should imagine Egyptian pyramids. The most important page of your website should be at the peak of the pyramid. Dividing the pyramid into some parts, you should create a connection between them. The peak page should get more links than others, and you should create a spider in a way that if the page is not linking to your essential page, it can be connected indirectly. Let’s say your important page is the page “A”. Page “B” links to “A”. And you have a page “C”, and there is no way to add a contextual link to “A”. But there is a great text that can be linked to the page “B”. So “C” links to “B”, “B” links to “A”. Connection completed. So in this case, Google understands that “A” is an important page of yours.

Step 2: Add contextual backlinks

Okay, you found your cornerstone content and structured your website. Let’s start adding contextual links to your website. Here, you need to know that the strategy of contextual internal linking and contextual external linking is different. As I said before, when you do internal linking, you signal to Google what your content is about. So this means that it is better for you to add internal contextual backlinks with exact match keywords, so the signal will be more powerful. If you do external contextual linking, anchors can be different. For example, on our website, we have an article about link building outsourcing. So, for effective internal linking, I can use keywords like “outsource link building”, “outsourcing link building”, “link building outsourcing”, “backlink building outsourcing”, and something like that. But if I use anchors like “outsourcing it”, “task that should be outsourced”, the impact of your internal linking will not be as quick as using exact meaning keywords. In this case, we say that relevance impacts ranking strength.

Step 3: Creating a hierarchy with internal linking

This part will be faster to introduce an example. On our website, we have a page about social media backlinks. Let’s name that page the parent page. I have a page about TikTok backlinks that is linked from my parent page. Plus, I have a page about the steps to add a link to a TikTok story. If I name the page about social media backlinks as a parent, I guess you understand which ones are the children and work in the hierarchy.

Step 4: Add categories or tags to your website

In our website’s blog section, we structured link building and SEO into different categories. This also helps for navigating as users, as search engines understand my articles and their arrangement. Users appearing in the blog section can easily dive into topics that are mostly in their interest watchlist, and they can find what they want as quick as possible.

Step 5: Add the Recent Post section to your blog

Adding a recent post section is very important. First, you create attention to your newly published articles. Secondly, it is a helping hand for indexing new articles that have been published recently. Recently published articles are rich with fresh information, and working on them can give you quick results.

Step 6: Adding a section of Popular articles

Adding a section of popular articles is a sign you want to emphasize the most important ones. This can be implemented in the blog section and can also be included in the footer section. For great visibility, footer links are more recommended as wherever your pages are ranked, you promote them on each page. Footer internal links are effective and clickable when the content they read is relevant to the promoted ones in your footer. So each visit to those pages can be a sign that the article is of a quality that is high enough to be ranked higher.

• Internal links should be dofollow: This is about giving a link value. Check if it is dofollow or nofollow links and make them all dofollow.
• On a single page, it is recommended not to add over 150 links, so that you do not lose crawling opportunities.
• Backlinks embedded inside Java applets, plugins, and Flash are usually not accessible.
• Links in submissions and links that are under a form cannot be visible to search engines.
• Backlinks that are created with JavaScript cannot be crawled; it is recommended to use an HTML tag for clear crawling.

If you are using WordPress for your website, there are many internal linking WordPress plugins available that you can use with automations and recommendation tracking, and some of them are integrated with AI.

Besides these plugins, there are famous SEO tools like Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Semrush, JetOctopus, and Sitebulb, which I can recommend you use to optimize and manage your internal links.

For me, the best example of internal linking you can see is Wikipedia. For some people, maybe overlinking is a strange thing. However, for my students whom I want to teach the philosophy of internal linking, the first website I open is Wikipedia. Of course, Wikipedia is not positioning itself as a source for a specific niche. However, even such a popular platform like Wikipedia will not rank if the internal contextual links are not included.

I hope you get enough information to start taking into account the importance of internal linking. However if you are not sure you will do it right it is better you search a contextual link building service that will handle the deal. Also, feel free to ask for a link-building consultation.