What is an internal link and why is internal linking important?

Understanding internal linking and how pages on your website can contribute value to new and orphan pages is critical, especially if you’re trying to boost your search engine rankings for a particular keyword or phrase.

On this page, we’ll take a look at internal linking best practices, as well as some tips you can implement to start improving your internal linking strategy to drive more traffic to your website. Keep reading to learn more, and give us a call at 888-601-5359.

This page covers the following topics:

1. What is internal linking
2. Why is internal linking important?
3. SEO best practices for internal linking
4. Strategies for improving internal linking
5. Learn more about internal linking on your site

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SEO best practices for internal linking

Now that you understand the importance of internal linking, let’s take a look at some SEO best practices that will help you get the most out of your internal linking strategy.

Use descriptive anchor text

First of all, it’s important to use descriptive keywords or phrases in the anchor text of your internal links.

Anchor text is the portion of the link that’s visible to site visitors. In other words, it’s the highlighted text that people click to visit other pages.

In order to give website visitors and search engines a clear idea of what to expect when they click the link, you need to use descriptive anchor text.

For example, if you are linking to a page located at, “http://www.example.com/pets/dogs.html,” your anchor text could simply say “dogs.”  This lets people know what information they will find if they click the link.

Create a crawlable link structure

Search engines need to have access to a crawlable link structure that allows search spiders to easily find and index all pages on a website.

If you want to see what your website’s link structure looks like, you can use Open Site Explorer.

Many websites make the mistake of burying main link navigation so that search engines can’t find it, and this can negatively impact their ability to get indexed by major search engines.

In other words, search engines need a way to reach pages on your website, and internal links make this possible. For example, a search spider may arrive page A and follow a link to page B. However, if pages A and B don’t link to page C, search crawlers will have no way to reach and index that page.

Crawlable link structures allow link juice (ranking power) to flow through your entire website and makes it easier for search engines to discover and index new pages.

Avoid links in submission-required forms and internal search boxes

Forms on your website might include simple drop-down menus, or they might feature surveys. However, it’s important to keep in mind that search spiders will not try to submit the forms. This means that any content or links made accessible via a form are not visible to search engines.

Search spiders will also not attempt to perform searches to discover content on your website. Therefore, it’s important that you don’t hide any content behind internal search boxes.

If you want to improve your internal linking strategy, you will need to use links that search engines can actually find and use to discover and index new pages on your site.

Use follow links

Both the meta robots tag and the robots.txt file allow website owners to restrict search spider access to website pages.

So if you want search engines to find pages on your website, you need to ensure that you use follow links that allow them to follow links to discover new pages.

Follow links are a great way to build an internal link structure for your content marketing, and they allow link value to flow freely.

Create quality content
In order to have lots of internal links, you need to create a lot of internal pages.

Search engines need to see content on each page in order to index them, and both search engines and website visitors alike love quality content.

Creating content related to your business, products, and services is a great way to improve your rank in search engine results, and it allows you to add internal links to valuable pages on your website. This will help to drive traffic to your site and provide people with the information they need to take the next step with your company.

Link deep

Instead of linking to pages that are already included in your site’s main navigation, we recommend looking for link opportunities deep within your sites structure. Sometimes, pages can get buried in your site’s architecture, so it’s important link to them from other top-level pages.

Rather than always linking to your home or contact pages, include links to other internal pages in order to boost the overall SEO value of your website. This will ensure that both search engines and website visitors can find pages on your website and easily digest the content.

Use natural links

Make sure internal links are natural for readers. When readers see informative links that match the context of the content, they will be more likely to click the link and explore other content on your website.

Including links in your website copy is like saying “Hey! This is important. Stop what you’re reading, and click the link!”

So you need to make sure that you link to relevant pages that provide value to readers and relate to the topic of the page that they’re currently visiting.

After all, if someone is reading about SEO, it probably wouldn’t make sense to direct them to a page about dog grooming tips.

When you include natural links to other pages on your website, visitors will become more involved in your website and will most likely spend a longer amount of time on your site.

Use a reasonable number of links

It’s also important that you keep the number of internal links on your website reasonable.

But what is a reasonable number of links?

Google engineer Matt Cutts said, “It seemed about right to recommend about 100 links or so,” and “in some cases, it might make sense to have more than a hundred.”

This includes all the links on a page— header, footer, nav bars, and ads.

It’s also important to remember that search engines will only crawl around 150 links on each page before they stop spidering pages linked from the original page. Though this number is somewhat flexible, and high authority pages may have 200-250 links followed, it’s generally wise to limit the number of links on a page to 150, or they may not all be crawled by search spiders.

In addition, links toward the top of pages carry more SEO value, so you should always place the most important links near the top of your website pages.

When it comes to linking in the actual copy of your pages, there’s no magic number. However, it’s important to consider your users and add links that are actually helpful for them. Instead of littering your pages with irrelevant links, add internal links to pages that contain related content that will provide visitors with valuable information.

Strategies for improving internal linking

Finally, let’s take a look at some strategies you can implement today to help you step up your internal linking game.

Make a map of your website

Create a list of each of the pages in your main website navigation and the links that are currently on those pages. This will help you understand the link structure of your website. And it might help you understand why some of your pages are already ranking well if you did a good job of building links to those pages from other internal content.

Consider topics you frequently write about

If you regularly write about a particular topic, you might consider creating a landing page dedicated to that topic. Then, you can link to that page from other related pages. This can help to boost your rankings in search engine results for a keyword or phrase related to your business.

And if you include a clear call to action on the landing page, your use of internal links can help to drive more traffic and conversions on that page.

Don’t forget your blog

Your blog is a great place include internal links to relevant content on your website.

For example, if you create a post about social media best practices, you can include a link to the social media pricing page on your website.

This is a great way to add valuable links to your sales and services pages if you’re looking to give them a boost in the SERPs. And you can also link from your website to your blog in order to increase its ranking potential.