Internal Linking Optimisation stands for the optimisation of your website’s internal hyperlinks that lead from one internal page to another and which are different from external links which lead from your pages to other pages on external domains or from pages on external domains leading to yours.
Internal Linking Importance
The importance of Internal Linking is multilayered. Firstly this is the main method that Search Engines such as Google use to discover new Landing Pages on your website. In a user-centric context, Internal Linking facilitates the navigation of users from one page to another in search for related topics.
Similarly, when used in an SEO context, Internal Linking facilitates the passing of Page Authority or URL Ranking from one page to another across your website. Lastly, Internal Linking serves as an additional hint to Search Engines about which pages are important, how different pages on your website are related to each other and what the page is about or what keywords it should rank for.
Internal Linking Structure
Internal Links on your website create a sort of structure for how Search Engine spiders will discover your content. Not only that but depending on the structure of your Internal Links and specifically the amount of Internal Links pointing to each page as well as their placement on the page, Search Engines will place a certain importance to your pages and will learn to associate them with particular topics. Additionally, Internal Linking also dictates the context of how your users will discover your content.
The primary way for a Search Engine to discover pages on the wider web before ranking them si simply by visiting the hyperlinks placed on already known pages. So, there is no woder that having hyperlinks on your page is important. The question, however, is how can you use this knowledge to your advantage?
The answer to that is a small set of general recommendations, such as making sure all your pages on the website are discoverable within a few clicks, or in other words having a rather flat site structure
In simple terms, when you link from one page on your website to another one, you’re casting a vote that the linked page is important. Although it may not be as important as a backlink coming from an external domain, it facilitates the flow of Page Authority or URL Ranking across pages on your website that may have a limited number of external backlinks, which puts you in a better position to compete for select keywords.
Although many SEO Mangers will recommend a process of Internal Linking that sees you linking from high traffic pages on your website to pages that you deem important, I would recommend approaching Internal Linking Optimisation strictly based on Semantics. In other words Internal Links should be placed not merely from pages that are high-traffic but from pages that are highly related to the linked-to page.
This philosophy can take many forms. For instance, it could be an Internal Link from a section on a page to a Landing Page that explains a concept in more detail. This could also be a page further up the hierarchy that provides a more high-level explanation of a broader topic or it could also be a related topic.
Most pages on the web focus on particular topics, however as it often happens a wider context is required to fully understand the information at hand. Instead of just explaining that context in full, you can just mention it on the page and link out to other internal pages on your website. Thus, users that are not familiar with it get the opportunity to visit the other pages and document themselves, while those that are not interested can move on without being presented with information that is irrelevant to them at this stage.
Internal Links Placement
Not all Internal Links are born equal and their placement on the page dictates how much of an importance they are assigned when casting their vote.
1. Navigationg Links
The very first form of Internal Linking comes in the form of Navigation Links. These are the links that will be used most often to navigate across your website and are normally placed at the very top of your page. Navigation links normally carry the function of leading to your most important pages on the website.
Although this might be self-explanatory, Navigation Links are not necessarily intended to lead to all the pages on your website. If you have a rather large number of pages, it is a good idea for any of them to be accessible within 3 clicks. This is how you create a website architecture, so you don’t overwhelm visitors with a large number of topics directly as part of your navigation.
2. Content Links
Content Links are hyperlinks that are placed within the body of the page. In the context of External Links, these carry the most weight when linking to other domains. However, their value is somewhat unclear when it comes to Internal Linking. In simple terms, the higher up the page the link is the stronger the vote it casts in marking a page important and the lower on the page the link is placed the lower the vote. It may also come in handy to know that the more Internal Content Links you have the weaker each one of them becomes.
Content Links are particularly useful for explaining adjacent topics in more detail as part of other Internal Pages. In a commercial setting, Internal Content Links are also often used to lead to commercial pages. This supports the idea that customers that you’re informing on a particular topic through content will be more inclined to buy from you if you place your offer in an appropriate manner within your content.
3. Footer Links
Footer Links can also take many forms. For many websites, it’s a great opportunity to accommodate this section to display a larger collection of Internal Links, including links to deeper pages that may not necessarily be featured within the main website navigation. In the case of websites with an overwhelmingly high number of pages, this section normally displays Internal Links to the most visited pages on the website.
4. Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs stand for small text paths, located at the top of the landing page that show the user’s current location on the website, leaving a trail of the path one would have to use to arrive at that landing page from the homepage of the website. In other words, the breadcrumbs are a more intuitive way of showing the URL of a landing page, with clickable sections that allow users to navigate back to broader categories, that the landing page is a part of.
Breadcrumbs are particularly relevant to those visitors who arrive at a landing page that is located deep in the website, guiding them to other parts of the website, lowering bounce rates and encouraging positive onsite behaviour.
Breadcrumbs play an important role for both users and search engines, as apart from being featured on the landing page, they may also be shown in organic search results, replacing the URL section. This affords the presentation of a landing page to appear more polished in search results, and therefore more appealing to the user.
Types of Breadcrumbs
This is the most common type of breadcrumbs, which shows the path one must take to get back to the website homepage.
Most commonly used on ecommerce sites, and show the attributes of a product, using tags, as opposed to categories to show one’s position on the website.
Show the historical pathway that was used to arrive to the landing page and can be seen as an alternative for one’s internet history bar.
Anchor Text Optimisation
Anchor Text plays a particularly big role in assigning a certain semantic meaning to a page. When you wrap a portion of text in an Anchor Text leading to another Internal Page, Search Engines such as Google will learn to associate that new page with the anchor text that is used to lead to it.
This creates several hypotheses that SEO Managers use to optimise Internal Linking. Firstly, it is highly advised to not link to different Internal Pages with the same Anchor Text as it creates an environment for Keyword Cannibalisation. Secondly, it is also advisable to not link to Internal Pages using generic Anchor Texts like “Click here” or “Read more” as they provide limited insight into what the page is about.
Internal Linking Considerations
There are a number of other considerations when carrying out Internal Linking Optimisation. Although this might be obvious to most SEO Managers, you must always use “Dofollow links”. The reason for this is that as we’ve explained earlier Search Engines follow links from page to page to discover and index new pages and if your links are “Nofollow”, Search Engines will not follow them, so your pages will remain undiscovered. Secondly, they won’t cast that importance vote that we care about.
Similarly, a common practice for Internal Links is for them to be opened within the same browser tab, so as to not interrupt the user experience flow. There are certain situations when you would want to open the links in a new tab and those situations normally fall under scenarios where you lead users to sections of the website which are stand-alone in some regard. There is nothing you need to do to ensure the links open within the same tab, they do so by default. This is very different from external links, which you will normally want to ensure that they open within a new tab, something that requires a small adjustment within your links’ code.
Lastly, another important consideration which is not always obvious is ensuring your Internal Links are absolute links and not relative links. The difference between the two is that the absolute links contain the entire address leading to the page, including the protocol and the domain name and subdirectories, while the relative Internal Links contain only the path of the URL in a relative manner to the existing URL, the page is linked from. This can prevent a whole different set of issues later down the line.
Avoiding Orphan pages
Orphan Pages are pages on your website that do not have Internal Links. In other words, if you have a page on your website that does not have another page linking to it, it will be flagged as an Orphan page by most technical SEO software. Although Orphan Pages can be discovered by Search Engines, such as Google from the website sitemaps, they sometimes tend to be ignored when indexing. It is an issue not only for Search Engines but also for users who wouldn’t be able to discover them from the other pages on your website.
Internal Linking from Homepage
As a general rule, you will want to link to the most important pages on your website from your Navigation. However, when it comes to the Homepage, you might want to sprinkle an additional list of links to the pages that don’t make it to the Navigation, but which you consider important.
In some instances, SEO Managers prefer to link to the top-performing pages, in others Internal Links appearing on the Homepage might be automatically generated and change periodically. Regardless of your possibilities, you should always consider your users and what links they might need to reach the pages that create a good first interaction with your brand.
Internal Linking Optimisation Automation
Although the WordPress plugin library isn’t without a plethora of Internal Linking Automation tools, I would generally discourage the use of automation when it comes to internal links. The reasons for avoiding Internal Links Automation are multilayered. Firstly, the automation tools are hardly in a good place to understand the wider context required for successfully placing links on your website. Secondly, instead of strategically linking internally from places where your customers need additional context, the automation tools are likely to be an oversimplified way of simply replacing targeted text with anchor text leading to other pages, which is far from ideal.