Editorial Staff
Every website contains external and internal links. In this post, we focus on internal linking and what they mean to the SEO.
Internal link is a link between two pages within the same website. Basically, it connects multiple pages on your website.
Here is a live example of an internal link: What is SEO and How it Works?
From the above example, you can see there is a hyperlink pointing to our other page (https://searchenginementor.com/what-is-seo-and-how-it-works) located in the page that you’re reading currently where the internal link is placed (https://www.searchenginementor/internal-linking).
Internal Link Placement
Internal link is not necessary to be in the body of the content.
It also can appear in the header such as the header logo (usually link to the website’s homepage), menu, category.
Other than header, internal link can also appear in the sidebar and the footer section.
Importance of Internal Linking For SEO
Internal linking is one of the strong SEO technique that every web owner should master.
1. Internal Link Increases Visitors’ Average Time on Site
Internal link provides you an opportunity to get your website’s visitors to spend time longer on your website.
Let’s take a look on the above illustration.
Lets say you created a post about “Instagram as digital marketing platform” and put an internal link in the middle of the content to another content in your website.
When your readers see this related link, there is a high chance that they will be curious and click the internal link since it is still related to the topic they are looking for.
After the visitor clicked the internal link, they will spend another time to read your other page.
So, what can you gain here?
Internal link increases the average time spent of website visitors and also help promoting your other contents at the same time!
The longer your visitors spend time in your website, the higher chance for you to rank in the search engine since Google will think that your website is useful for the readers.
2. Internal Link Gives Google Idea on Your Website Structure
Google follows links. This means that Google’s bot will follow your internal link and look into all your pages within the site.
Internal links establish a hierarchy on your website.
If a certain page gets a lot of internal links, the Google’s bot will look into that page more often.
If your page gets less or no links, the Google’s bot will not bother to look into that page.
Website Structure Hierarchy
If you’re curious on how Google think of your website structure, they see it as a pyramid.
The top is your homepage, while below is the category pages, and further below are individual pages/posts.
This means your homepage has the most powerful link among all the pages within your website.
But why is that?
Remember that earlier we discussed about the link placement, where the header logo that links to the homepage always appear at the header section?
Since the homepage link appear in all the website’s page, it has the most internal links from your website.
Link Value Pass Concept
Now you might have a question in mind: “So what if the homepage has the most powerful link value? What can I do about it?”
The link value of a page will be passed and distributed among all the links placed on that page.
For example, if your homepage has A+ quality of link value.
Hence, it will pass down A+ quality of link value to all the links placed in your homepage.
Let’s take a look on the below illustration:
Let’s put it this way,
Lets say you just published a new post in your website and think what is the best way to do the internal linking strategy.
Your new post will gain more link value if you put the internal link to your new post on your website homepage, instead of category page.
This is because your homepage has the most powerful link value to be passed on all the links on the homepage.
Google will mark your new post as important since it is linked from the most powerful link value page in your site and you will increase the chance of that new post ranking in the search engine.
In addition, Google bot will find and look into your new post quicker if that post was linked from the homepage.
Now that you had learnt about internal linking, let’s check out what is external linking on the next lesson!
