Internal Link Building - Linking to Content Pages on your Website

Internal link-building is an on-site SEO tactic that consists of creating a well-organized and thorough link structure among your own website's pages. In other words, as many pages as possible should be connected to each other in a hierarchical or web-like connections of in-page, text-based hyperlinks.

Our Tip to You: Build internal links

Pay particular attention to creating connections between your main pages and your homepage; do so via menu objects or by placing the links right into your on-page content. Another helpful internal link-building feature is a sitemap, which has the benefit of also helping search spiders index your site better and faster.

Why Internal Links help SEO

Internal Link Building is an important factor in improving your organic search results of your website. Remember that a search engine's ultimate goal is to surface the very best few pages about a topic on the web. With the focus that most link builders and SEO specialists have on inbound links and developing links from other sites, it is easy to overlook how internal linking is important. If you've heard that inbound links are like other sites voting for your content and telling search engines what your content is about, internal links are like voting for yourself and also letting the search engine know about your vote. While it's obviously better to have more people than just yourself voting for your content, if you don't start by voting for yourself, the search engines will have a difficult time considering your page as one of the best on the web. Internal links are valuable not just because they are a direct signal that your content is important, but also because those links themselves pass on their own link authority.

How to Leverage Internal Linking

If there's a page on your website that you care about a lot and that has a lot of value to you, you should be thinking about how you can explain that value to a search engine. Start by considering how a search engine understands the value of an internal link; it's looking at how many pages on your website link to that page, and how they link to it. If every page of your website links to something, it must be important to you — like your homepage, or your blog's homepage. If the only links in to your blog are from your ‘About Us' section and nothing from your homepage or your website's main navigation, you have already sent a strong signal to search engines that your blog is not very strong. On the other hand, if your blog is in the main navigation on your website, Google and Bing will treat it like one of your top pages.

3 Simple Ways to Improve the Internal Linking on Your Website

There are few things that there is important to consider when it comes to building internal links, we have broken those down to 3 areas of focus:

1. Sketch out a map of your website

Make a list of each page in your main navigation and what links are on each of those major pages. This will help you understand the links that you already have between each section of your site, and how you've linked it together in the past. Sometimes, laying out your whole website visually is the only way to understand what you've overlooked and what's working. You might just uncover that the reason some of your best pages are ranking well is because you subconsciously did a great job building your own links into them from your other content.

2. Look at the topics that you frequently write about

If you're writing regularly about something, you should have another dedicated page on your website about that topic — like a landing page with an offer, for example. Each of those posts should be linking to that authoritative page on the subject, and it should be optimized for conversions. If your landing page has a prominent call-to-action, your effective use of internal linking will help drive more new leads through the offer.

3. Think about every other page that could link to your ranking page

If it is a webpage related to a topic you frequently blog about, make sure each of your new blog posts about that topic reference that page and link into it.