Internal Linking For SEO: A Guide For Beginners!

Have you ever wondered why Wikipedia articles almost always rank on the first page and a lot of time in the top position of the SERP?

One of the major reasons why it happens is internal linking. All Wikipedia articles, if you see, are beautifully linked. Yes, internal linking plays a crucial role in SEO.

Check Out The Top 9 Factors That Determine Link Equity

What Are Internal Links?

Internal links are links or hyperlinks to webpages in the same domain. That is, clicking on these links will take you to another page on the same website.

Internal links play a very important role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But before we move onto the importance of internal linking in SEO, let\’s see how an html link looks:

As you can see, the HTML code to insert a link has three parts:

1. Destination page where you will land if you click on the link.
2. \’nofollow\’ Tag to tell crawlers not to follow the link. If you do not include the rel = \’\’nofollow\’\’ tag, then its \’dofollow\’ and crawlers will, in that case, follow the link to go to the destination page.
3. Anchor Text which is the clickable, link text or label, clicking on which will take you to the destination page.

Let us now see how internal linking helps in SEO.

Importance Of Internal Linking In SEO

Internal linking helps in SEO in the following ways:

1. Internal Links Makes Web Pages (And Other Documents) Accessible: Crawlers discover web pages, be it external or internal, by following the hyperlinks on a page where it has landed. If you are linking to Page B from Page A, and if it is a dofollow link, crawlers landing on Page A will discover the link and then follow it to Page B.

   Even humans/users follow these links to visit other pages in the website. Thus, interlinking makes webpages accessible to both search engines and users.

2. Internal Links Passes Link Juice, Thereby, Improving Ranking: Interlinking strategically helps in passing link juice or link equity to the linked page. This, in turn, helps in improving the SEO ranking of the linked page.
3. Internal Links Helps In Creating Context & Establishing Relevancy: Let\’s say, in an article, you include the text \’SEO Techniques\’ and then hyperlink it to another article that you have written. Let\’s say, the linked article is titled \”Top 10 SEO Practices To Improve Ranking\” with \’SEO Practices\’ as the target keyword. Let\’s also say that it\’s a dofollow link.

   Now, when crawlers discovers this link with \’SEO Techniques\’ as the anchor text and follows it to the linked page (with \’SEO Practices\’ as the primary keyword), it interprets this as \’SEO Techniques\’ and \’SEO Practices\’ both meaning the same thing.

   This, in turn, helps in getting the article \”Top 10 SEO Practices To Improve Ranking\” ranked for \’SEO Techniques\’ as well.

Best Practices While Interlinking

So, now that you know the importance of internal linking for SEO, let\’s look into some of the best practices for interlinking:

1. Use keyword rich texts in the anchor text. For example, if you are linking to an article on anonymous blogging platforms, do not use just \’blogging platforms\’ as the anchor text.
2. Do not use the same anchor texts for two different pages. If anything, it will confuse Google.
3. Link to relevant pages. Do not try to misguide the crawlers. Nor the users. Link to relevant pages.
4. Link to pages that are important, either in terms of driving traffic or any other purpose. Do not waste  your link juice on unnecessary pages.
5. Do not put too many links on a single page.

I hope this detailed article on Internal Linking for SEO helps you. If you have any question or if you have any suggestions to make, feel free to let me know.