The Ultimate Guide to Internal Link Building Strategies

Internal link building is a crucial aspect of SEO that can significantly improve your website's visibility and user experience. A well-structured internal linking strategy can help search engines understand the hierarchy and relevance of your content.

By linking to relevant and high-quality pages on your website, you can increase the crawl rate of your site, reduce bounce rates, and improve user engagement. This, in turn, can lead to higher search engine rankings and more conversions.

Internal linking also helps to distribute link equity throughout your website, which can benefit pages that might not have been crawled or indexed otherwise. By linking to these pages, you can give them a boost in search engine rankings.

Internal linking is the process of hyperlinking to other pages on your website, keeping users on your site and making it easier for them to navigate.

Internal links form the structure of your website's architecture, like a pyramid with your homepage at the top. Ideally, any page should be reachable in three clicks or less.

Strategically adding internal links can have major benefits to your SEO performance, as they help search engine spiders crawl and index all your pages.

By adding internal links, you're helping web crawlers gain more information about your content, which influences whether or not they'll promote those pages in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Internal links are created using buttons, clickable images, and anchor text, which is the clickable part of the hyperlink that links to another page.

When the anchor text for a page contains its targeted keyword, it improves the SEO value of that page.

You likely have several types of internal links on your website right now. Understanding their differences is important for your website visitors' journey.

There are several types of internal links, and they play a key role in guiding your website visitors through your site.

Internal links can be used to elevate the rankings of specific pages, which is crucial for search engine optimization.

Dofollow links are necessary to pass along PageRank, and they tell Google crawlers to follow the links on the page rather than ignore them.

The nofollow tag can be used for pages that don't need to rank, like confirmation pages.

You'll need to use the dofollow robots tag for internal links that you want to elevate rankings, otherwise they have no value.

Internal linking is an integral part of on-page optimization, and doing it the right way can elevate your ranking potential.

Use tools like Screaming Frog to assess your internal linking structure and identify opportunities for improvement. Screaming Frog can help you filter by "Inlinks" to organize URLs by those with the most internal links.

Filtering by pages that include a specific term can also be useful for identifying internal link building opportunities. For example, if you're trying to build links to your page about internal link building, you can use Screaming Frog to find all pages that mention "internal links".

Investing in tools like Majestic, Moz, and Ahrefs can also help you optimize your internal link structure. These tools will tell you which pages on your site have the most external backlinks, so you'll know where your most powerful internal links could be built.

Optimize your anchor text to ensure humans and bots understand where the link is pointing. Traditionally, SEO professionals shun exact match anchor text, but with internal links, it's ideal to be as clear and specific as possible.

Optimizing internal links is a crucial step in internal link building. Internal linking is the process of hyperlinking to other pages on your website.

To make your website more visible on the SERP, any page on your website should ideally be reachable in three clicks or less from the homepage. This is because Google's crawlers won't see it if there is no internal link or deep link to a page on your website.

Dofollow links are necessary to pass along PageRank, which is a proprietary Google metric that speaks to the popularity of a web page. Without dofollow links, your internal links will have no value.

Anchor text is the term for the text in which the hyperlink is embedded. Your internal links should have relevant anchor text, at minimum, and preferably anchor text that aligns with your keyword strategy.

The more internal links you point to a page, the more important search engine bots will think that page is. This can influence which keywords and phrases they will associate with your pages.

You should use descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text to signal stronger relevance to Google. This will help your linked-to page rank for specific keywords.

Internal links also help distribute PageRank across your website, which is a measure of the popularity of a web page. Every time that a page links to another, it passes along a portion of its PageRank, or link equity.

You should avoid wasting PageRank on pages that just don't need to rank. Instead, use nofollow tags to prevent link equity from being passed to these pages.

You can leverage your website's internal links to achieve more advanced strategies.

Developing an internal link building strategy from scratch is possible for anyone with the right time, resources, and dedication.

Internal linking can be used to sculpt your website's PageRank more strategically through internal links and nofollow tags.

The majority of your site's PageRank will be centered on your homepage, making navigation and footer links extremely important.

You can use PageRank sculpting to avoid wasting your site's link equity on pages that don't bring value or convert users.

For a more detailed understanding of how to leverage PageRank sculpting, you can check out a dedicated guide.

Redirects can be a major pitfall if not handled correctly. There are two main types of redirects - 301 and 302.

Adding no-follow attributes to your links is another mistake to watch out for. For most internal links, no follow tags are not needed to distribute link equity across your website.

Redirects can be counterproductive if not used correctly. A long redirect chain can slow down your site and waste crawl budget.

Using no-follow attributes for internal links is a common mistake. Most of the time, you don't need to no-follow internal links, especially if you want to distribute link equity across your website.

Adding too many internal links to a single page can be overwhelming. Typically, five to 10 internal links per page is a good rule of thumb, but use your discretion and prioritize the best user experience.

Not using dofollow tags for internal links can render them useless. If you want to elevate a page's rankings, the link needs to be dofollow to pass along PageRank.

Using redirects where it's not essential can create problems. Link directly to the new destination pages, especially for 301 redirects, to avoid confusion and slow site speeds.

To avoid the mistake of insufficient page crawl depth, it's essential to keep all your important pages within three clicks from the homepage. This is because search bots have a harder time crawling pages that are too far away from the homepage.

The rule of thumb is that no page should be more than three clicks away from the homepage to perform optimally on search results. This means taking care of your site architecture from the beginning to avoid the hassle of restructuring a website after it's grown big.

Having all your important pages as close to the homepage as possible will make it easier for search engines to crawl and discover new pages. If there's no internal link or deep link to a page on your website, Google's crawlers won't see it.

This is why crawl depth optimization is crucial, especially for larger websites that can easily max out Google's crawl budget. Enterprise sites with thousands of landing pages can have thousands of pages that aren't even in Google's index.

By prioritizing page crawl depth, you can ensure that all your important pages are easily discoverable by search engine crawlers, and therefore crawled and indexed. This is an essential step to making your website more visible on the SERP.

In fact, Google's crawlers can only crawl and index a limited number of pages per day, known as the crawl budget. This means that if you have a large website with many pages, you need to optimize your internal linking to make sure that Google's crawlers can find and index all your important pages.

Internal linking is a crucial part of your website's architecture, and it's essential to keep it up-to-date.

Ideally, any page on your website should be reachable in three clicks or less. This means that your internal linking profile should be well-structured and easy to navigate.

Broken links can harm your SEO potential, as crawlers don't find any useful information when following the link. This can lead to a higher bounce rate, which subsequently harms SEO.

You should regularly audit your site to find and fix broken links. Point links to existing, functional pages to fix them if possible.

Here are some common reasons why links can become broken:

If you can't remove the broken link, you can at least redirect it to minimize SEO harm.

Internal linking can be a powerful tool for improving your website's structure and user experience.

You can use tools like Screaming Frog to assess your internal linking structure and identify opportunities for improvement.

Screaming Frog allows you to filter by "Inlinks" to organize URLs by those with the most internal links, making it easier to identify your top internally linked pages.

Link tools like Majestic, Moz, and Ahrefs can also be useful for planning internal link building, as they can tell you which pages on your site have the most external backlinks.

Anyone can develop an internal link building strategy, regardless of technical expertise, as keyword research is the most complex part of internal linking and can be learned with dedication.

Investing in tools like Screaming Frog can help you optimize your internal link structure to receive maximum benefit from your internal link building efforts.

You can see significant boosts in results with internal link building, with brands like Ninja Outreach reporting a 40 percent increase in organic traffic after implementing a new strategy.

Internal link building can also improve search rankings, as seen in the case study from Orbit Media Studios, where a page went from rank 33 to rank 5 for the phrase "IT hiring trends 2013."

By monitoring search terms, you can track the effectiveness of your internal link building efforts, as demonstrated by the study from Dave Davies, where a site saw 56 more top-100 terms and 2 additional top-3 terms after a broken internal links overhaul.

A good internal link building strategy should also lead to increased time spent on page, content discovery, and revenue, as internal links encourage visitors to explore more content and engage with your site.

Internal links can significantly impact your visitor behavior, encouraging people to spend more time on your site and reading complementary articles.

Time on page is a key metric to track, as it indicates that your content is engaging and relevant to your audience. This can lead to a lower bounce rate and higher conversion rates.

Internal links can also support higher search rankings, especially when combined with other positive indications of quality content, such as high time spent on page and low bounce rate.

Persuasive internal links can increase your conversion rate, improving your bottom line and reputation.

Ninja Outreach reported a 40 percent increase in organic traffic after launching an internal link building campaign.

Creating silos for content, dividing them into subtopics, and assigning keywords to pages based on value can have a significant impact on search rankings.

Another study from Orbit Media Studios showed that a page can jump from rank 33 to rank 5 for a specific phrase by optimizing internal linking structure and making onsite tweaks.

A broken internal links overhaul can completely change search rankings, as seen in a case study from Dave Davies, where the site in question gained 56 more top-100 terms and 2 additional top-3 terms.