What is Internal Linking: It's Benefits, and Best Practices

Digital marketing is gaining popularity with time as more and more brands are resorting to the Internet to attract new customers to their website. And, one of the common ways to increase brand exposure is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While new entrants to the online bandwagon struggle to choose the right strategy and continue chasing from one strategy after another, however, the veterans in this field know the right methods that can work.

While the SEO is a vast subject which is rapidly evolving and is an ongoing process, this blog covers the most common and an interesting technique in the realm of SEO – Internal Linking.

Let’s understand what is an internal link and why it is an essential element in an SEO strategy?

What is an Internal link?

Internal Link is a significant element in the SEO; it is a link that connects another internal page of your website. For eg, a link in the blog post that connects your internal page (service page) of your own website. Internal linking helps you to build the authority of pages on your website and enables you to get these pages ranked and indexed.

Internal links are valuable as it strengthens the search engine results pages (SERPs) of a website.

Some of the quick benefits of having a robust internal linking strategy are:

It supports the crawlers or spiders by providing them a clear path to navigate through the website
Increases backlinks and connects your content pages at a deeper level enabling Google to understand structure and establish hierarchy of your website
Allows Google to distribute the page authority to the most important pages and posts
Provides value to the website visitor through a tightly-knit website
Improves overall site performance in the SERPs

But, before we craft an effective internal linking strategy, it is crucial for the website owners to relook and evaluate their website. One of the most common mistakes found in many websites is with their site architecture. Their main navigation links are buried or hidden which are not accessible directly by the search engines.

It is recommended that an optimal website structure that looks like a pyramid is followed for a website that has the most important piece of content on the top.

The above illustration shows a website that follows a pyramid structure (which is organized with categories, topics and sub-categories) that has a minimum number of links between the top homepage and the other page. Such a kind of structure allows the link juice to flow throughout the entire website and increases the ranking potential of each page of the site.

Now, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of internal linking. Let’s understand:

What are the best practices of internal linking?
What are various ways to access websites internal link architecture?

6 Best Practices of Internal Linking

Outlined below are top six best practices you must consider for your internal linking strategy.

Create lots of content in your site

Before you kick start with your internal link building strategy, the first and foremost thing you need is to have a great content marketing plan in place. Simply having 3-4 posts will not suffice the purpose and will not produce any tangible results. To get this going, you need to produce lots of content. It is a good idea to write articles, blogs and whitepapers on the niche topics and sharing it with your end users/community. Before you publish your post add internal links to the relevant post that is already published.

Use of appropriate anchor text

When you begin working on the internal link building strategy, make sure that you use relevant anchor text in the content. The anchor text is a clickable set of phrase or text that a user can see which describes what the target link is all about. Ensure that using relevant keywords as anchor text should appear natural and fair to both the Google search engines and the users. While it is vital to know some of the “how’s” to use anchor text, it is equally important to know to “not to do with it.

Remember not to over-optimize anchor text as it might hurt your website
Do not add the exact keywords to each of your anchor texts
Do not use your CTA phrases as anchor texts such as “Learn More” or “Click here”; Anchor text needs to be specific about the target article
Do not link an entire sentence in a paragraph; Keep your anchor link phrase precise and shorter.

No of links to have in an article

Every time a new piece of content is generated, it is recommended to add reasonable number of links in your internal content piece. From an internal linking context, it is suggested that a page carries four to five links depending upon the length of the post. Adding too many links in the article can also dilute the SEO value passed on to the other pages. The internal linking strategy refreshes the old content of your site and passes on a strong signal to the users making them aware that the link provides relevant and good content. It also allows Google search engine to review and index your content / pages on a regular basis, increasing its ranking in the SERPs.

Focus on relevant links

Internal linking is the art of SEO. Though it is wise to have links in your content but merely adding links just for the sake of it is not advisable. Hence, adding links to the relevant content which makes it logical and adds value to both the end users and search engines

Fix the broken links

To make internal link building exercise effective, the website owners must periodically check the health of the website to find any broken or missing links. Broken links are bad for SEO. There are many tools and plugins available (such as http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/) that easily provides you the list of broken links. It is always better to avoid broken links or take an immediate action to fix these broken links and keep the website healthy.

Follow your internal links

One of the key point is that you follow your internal links in your content marketing strategy. The old method of adding a “No-follow” tag on the links of a page was to increase the link juice of that page, however, this SEO strategy does not work now with the smarter Google algorithms. Following your links makes the link value flow freely from one page to another within your website. Keep the link value fluid and free flowing.

What are various ways to access websites internal link architecture?

Once you jumpstart with your internal linking strategy and after placing few quality links on your pages, you will see that the pages with links will start ranking higher with search engines than the one without the links.

However, at this time, it is absolutely critical for the website owners to keep a close check on on the growth of organic traffic and its rankings.

Take a quick look at few of the tools and reports to help you with deeper insights on internal links and its structure.

Screaming Frog

This application crawls your website and provides a comprehensive report on internal linking and other SEO related activities. The report helps you with in depth information on how to optimize your website for superior user experience and search engine visibility. The tool also provides recommendations based on the audit report, which when implemented can help you see tangible results such as increase in traffic, leads and conversation, thereby increasing the bottom line. (Visit to know more: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk)

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

It is a free app that can crawls your website to check for any broken links and the status of all the other links on your website. It generates a plain HTML report that enables you to take correct actions based on the report. It is a good tool but not as descriptive and informative like Screaming Frog. (Visit to know more: https://xenus-link-sleuth.en.softonic.com/)

Google Analytics

This powerful tool can help you track your links and how often these links are clicked. The deep dive into this tool can help you to see all the related information of a website and also provides recommendations. (Visit to know more: https://analytics.google.com/)

Final Thoughts

Internal linking has its own significance specially in improving the overall SEO performance, and improving SEO juices to attract organic traffic and rankings. But, overdoing it or if done incorrectly can completely ruin your SEO strategy. The winning strategy is to implement the recommendations and build a strong internal architecture to ultimately increase sales and revenue.

What is Internal Linking: It’s Benefits, and Best Practices – Unyscape

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