The Importance Of Internal Linking

When you’re dealing with on site SEO, one of the most important and yet often over looked aspects of the entire process is internal linking. Considering the fact that internal linking greatly increases your search engine rank and how easily visitors can navigate your site for relevant information.

When building these links, you first want to make sure that you’re doing them correctly. Just like external links (both incoming and outgoing), you’ll want to take advantage of the anchor text and title tag for the links you’re building. Whereas external incoming links to your site benefit you the most if you have them use your preferred keywords, internal links are directing you towards other pages or articles and should be constructed with relative anchor text and title tags for their intended destination.

So on their own, your links are now helping your readers navigate to relevant information. But how can they help you gain search engine rank?

Contextual Internal Links

Within the content of your site there are plenty of relevant keywords ripe for the choosing without even going back and rewriting the article. Adding links from one article to another based on their relevant keywords, within appropriate context is of huge benefit in regard to passing link juice. All links pass on value to their destination, but having irrelevant links to pages simply in an attempt to increase page rank is more detrimental then it is useful.

Chances are, you have at least one page on your website with some page rank. You can take advantage of this and help develop the ranking of another page through a process of Page Rank Sculpting. By removing links or adding rel=nofollow to the links already in place on that page, you can establish a new link or focus on an existing one to send all of the link juice to your desired destination. Don’t sacrifice how easily that page can be navigated, but do take advantage of the benefit it can bring.

Rel=Nofollow

Think of each outgoing link as a recommendation. If you were to pass out recommendations for everyone in your family (your own site), how many people would take you or the recommendations seriously? Just like theres no need to give good old grandma a recommendation for a job interview, you probably don’t need to pass any love onto pages on your site such as your “About Us” page or your “Terms of Service” page. Adding rel=nofollow into the html of those links will prevent the passing of link juice to those pages, keeping it where it can be the most beneficial. Any page that wouldn’t benefit you from being found in a search engine should have the rel=nofollow tag attached to it.

Don’t Overdo It

It’s easy to pull up a list of your articles and dig through other articles to place internal links in them. But the more sparingly you use this practice, the more benefit you and your readers gain from it. As long as you’ve got some internal links to start, you’re on a good path. Increase them as you find it relevant, but make sure not to overdo it or you might just turn your audience away.

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