Internal Linking
Learn the best practices to develop strong internal links within the website to help search engines understand the website’s structure and discover the content.
What is internal linking?
An internal link is a hyperlink that points from one page on a website to another page on the same website. It’s different from external links, which are hyperlinks pointing to pages on a different website.
While all SEOs focus their energies on backlinks, many overlook optimizing internal linking of the domain. When done strategically, internal linking offers the following benefits:
It helps search engines understand our website’s structure and build connections between the pages.
It allows us to pass more link value, and thus more authority, to the most important pages on our website.
It helps pass ranking power from pages with high-quality backlinks to other pages on the site.
It helps users navigate through the related pages within our website.
Types of internal links
Internal links can be broadly categorized into two types: navigational internal links and contextual internal links. They both work differently, serving slightly different goals for our website.
Navigational internal links
Navigational internal links appear in the navigation bars, headers, or footers of the website. Navigation bars are especially important for e-commerce websites where there are plenty of categories and product pages. They help visitors find what they’re looking for. Though they add to the user experience, make pages more indexable and help build the site’s structure and hierarchy, they don’t pass PageRank.
