Getting your internal linking structure right is a mission-critical step in building your search engine rankings, enhancing UX, and maximizing your site’s potential on the SERP.
If you’re reading this, you already know that internal linking structure matters, at least hypothetically. Link building — internal and external — is a core engine in the SEO machine and one of the best things you can do to improve your site’s rankings on the SERP.
Don’t believe us? Take it straight from the horse’s mouth. “The vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are through links,” says Google’s SEO Starter Guide. “Links [are] a crucial resource you need to consider to help your pages be discovered by Google and potentially shown in search results.”
Today, we’ll look at the fine art of building an internal linking structure. We’ll cover what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to guide users (and Google) through your site.
What Are Internal Links?
Internal links lead from one of your website’s pages to another page on that same website. This includes (but is not limited to) links within a blog post that point to another relevant article on the site or links in your navigation menu that help users find different sections.
Internal links do two things: Guide the human visitor through your website, and tell our Google overlords what your website is about.
Linking for Humans
For visitors to your site, the use case is pretty clear. Internal links can help create a smooth and intuitive experience, offering additional information about products or services when relevant.
This can help keep users on your site longer and help them find solutions to the problems that led them to your site in the first place.
For example, if you’re writing an article about how to make chocolate chip cookies, hyperlinking the text “fair trade chocolate chips” to another article on your site titled “Where to Find Fair Trade Chocolate” would be a great opportunity for an internal link (even better if you happen to sell those chocolate chips).
Linking for Robots
For search engines, links are big flashing neon signs for search engine bots, helping them index all the pages on your site.
They also help establish the importance of different pages — because if a page is linked to many times, it must be important, right? Or at least, that’s what robot logic tells us.
Knowing how crawlers will index your site, you can strategically use internal links to wave a giant flag to crawlers that your other pages are important, too. More links naturally equal a higher-value page, so a page with more internal links will be more likely to rank in SERPs over time.
What’s the Difference Between an Internal and External Link?
We need to cover one clarification before we move forward. There are two types of links on the internet: internal links and external links. It’s important to understand the difference between the two before throwing links around like confetti.
- An internal link is a link that directs a user from one page on your website to another page on your website.
- An external link is a link that points to a completely different website.
| Internal Links | External Links |
|---|---|
| Keeps users on your domain, helps search engines crawl your site effectively, boosts engagement and link equity. | Provides external resources, supports claims, builds trust/authority, enhances content credibility. |
| In a post on “SEO for Dummies,” you might link the text “keyword research” to a post you wrote. | In a post on “SEO for Dummies,” you might link to a statistic about the state of SEO from a trusted source. |
| Link: MYSITE.com/blog/keyword-research/ | Link: EXTERNALPAGE.com/stats/seo-statistics |
Other Common Types of Links
If you’re busily poking holes in our link breakdown above by imagining other types of links, you’re not wrong! There are many types of links, and most of them can be sorted into the external or internal buckets.
Some common types of links you might encounter in the beautiful and diverse ecosystem of links include:
- Navigation links: These are hyperlinks found in menus or other consistent site-wide locations. These are internal links.
- Contextual links: These hyperlinks are embedded directly within your text content’s body. They’re primarily internal, but can be external, especially if you’re citing a source for a stat or a quote.
- Footer links: These are hyperlinks in the footer section of your website. They often link to legal policies or contact information. They are mostly internal, with occasional external links.
- Image links: These are hyperlinks attached to images on your website. They can be internal or external.
- Call-to-action (CTA) links: These are buttons or prominent text designed to encourage a specific user action. They’re primarily internal.
- Related posts/products links: These are hyperlinks often displayed at the end of content or product pages suggesting similar or relevant items. They’re always internal.
Why Does Internal Linking Structure Matter?
Maybe a better question would be why doesn’t internal linking structure matter? IYKYK, right?
Kidding aside, there are three major reasons why you should be investing in internal linking:
Crawlability and Indexing
Internal linking structure is a must when it comes to crawlability. Internal links show search engine crawlers what content to look at and how to weigh it for search.
If you have a beautiful page or post but no links leading to it, it’s unlikely to show up in search.
Creating clear link pathways ensures all your essential content is more likely to be found and included in search results — making it readable by both robots and humans alike.
Distribution of Link Equity
Beyond discovery, internal links are also crucial in link equity distribution. When one of your pages earns valuable links from external sources, the authority (or “link juice,” if you will) it gains can be passed on to other relevant pages through internal links.
Linking from high-authority pages to new or low-ranking pages that you really wish would rank higher can increase their visibility. This process enhances Google’s understanding of your site, demonstrating which pages you consider most important and how different pieces of content relate.
User Experience
A smart internal linking structure also directly benefits user experience. Visitors who can easily find information that answers their questions on your website will spend more time clicking through pages. The better you lay out the red carpet by providing related content to click on, the more answers they’ll find.
This intuitive navigation yields a higher time on your site, and a lower bounce rate — both of which are indicators to search engines that your content is valuable. It’s a win-win scenario for both humans and robots.
Key takeaway: Strategically placed internal links are your site’s Bat-Signal, showing search engines how to understand and sort the content across your website.
How To Build a Perfect Internal Linking Structure
Okay, now that we know all about internal linking theory, let’s talk about how to put it into practice.
Step 1: Audit Your Existing Structure
Before you start building, you need to understand what’s already on your website. The first step is to audit your existing internal links.
Content marketing tools like Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider can crawl your entire website and provide a list of all the internal links you already have.
This allows you to analyze your link distribution and determine whether the links you already have are pointing to the right places. It will also help you check for broken links and redirects, which can negatively impact user experience and SEO.
Audit checklist:
- Are there any broken internal links (404 errors)? Broken links signal a poorly maintained site to search engines and aren’t great for UX. Fixing these is foundational.
- Are my most essential pages receiving sufficient internal links from relevant content? Your most important pages need the largest number of links to signal their importance to search engines correctly.
- Is my anchor text relevant and descriptive of the destination page? Relevant anchor text helps search engines understand what each page is about. Misleading anchor text will only confuse both the crawler and your visitors.
- Are there any orphaned pages on my site? Orphaned pages (sad pages with no internal links pointing to them) are invisible to search engine crawlers and your real human site visitors — essentially making that content worthless for SEO.
- Does the internal linking structure support a clear site hierarchy and topic clusters? A logical structure helps users and search engines understand the relationships between your content and the overall authority of your site on specific topics.
Once you’ve completed your SEO audit, you should have a good idea of what changes to implement to improve your internal links and can move on to the next step.
Step 2: Plan Your Ideal Structure
Once you understand where you’re starting from, you can plan your ideal internal linking structure. To do this, you’ll define your site hierarchy, which basically means outlining your most important pages and how they relate to each other. This is especially important when it comes to blog setup.
Identifying your pillar content — those comprehensive, authoritative pages that cover core topics — is key. These pillar pages will often be the central hubs in your structure. A definitive long-form piece of content like “What is content marketing?” or another core landing page would be a good example of a pillar page.
Here’s an example of what a good site hierarchy looks like:
From there, you can map topic clusters, create supporting content that delves into more specific aspects of your pillar topics, and link back to them. This creates a nifty little network that signals expertise to search engines.
Step 3: Implement Contextual Links
The heavy lifting part of an internal linking strategy lies within your content itself. Once you have a site hierarchy and all the major pages connected, it’s time to connect your smaller pages to each other and increase the number of links to your main pillar pages.
We do this by adding contextual links. Contextual links are links within lines of text that take the reader to other pertinent pages on your site, and are a big part of SEO writing.
The importance of relevant anchor text cannot be overstated. You want to link the text that best describes what the new page is about.
Pro tip: When choosing anchor text, think about what a user would type into Google or Google alternatives to find the information on the destination page.
Step 4: Optimize Navigational Elements
Beyond contextual links, your site’s navigational elements significantly influence internal linking. Optimizing the main navigation ensures users and search engines can easily access your core pages.
Similarly, strategically utilizing footer links can highlight crucial supplementary content or legal pages.
Don’t overlook the potential of sidebar links for promoting related articles, popular content, or key conversion pages! Ensure these navigational elements are intuitive and contribute to a clear site structure.
Step 5: Strategically Link New Content
As you create new content, make internal linking a fundamental part of your publishing process, just as you would consider your strategy for earning valuable SEO links. Link from older content to your new pages to help them get discovered and gain initial authority.
You can also link new content to your pillar content to reinforce its importance and strengthen connections within your site. If you’re having trouble with this, you can use an internal link suggestion tool to help identify relevant linking opportunities as you write.
Step 6: Regularly Monitor, Audit, and Refine
Internal linking is not a one-time thing! You’ll need to update your internal links regularly, ideally setting up a process for refining your linking strategy based on performance.
Ask questions like this in your audit:
- Are my links driving traffic?
- Are they contributing to conversions?
- Are all my links still working?
Regularly auditing your link structure can help you fix broken links, find missed opportunities for additional traffic, and identify ways to improve your website or blog design.
SERPs are constantly changing, so your linking strategies will need to change and grow, too. You may need to add new content, remove old pages, or even restructure to adapt and keep ranking.
| 6 Steps to Internal Linking Success | |
|---|---|
| Step 1: Audit | Check your site for broken internal links. |
| Step 2: Plan | Map key pages for linking. |
| Step 3: Contextual linking | Link pages to relevant text, like “resources” to YOURSITE.com/resources. |
| Step 4: Navigation | Link menu elements to relevant pages, like “Services” in your site’s main menu. |
| Step 5: New content | Link new blogs to relevant posts. |
| Step 6: Monitor and refine | Track internal linking performance. |
Internal Linking Best Practices
Ready to start building out your internal linking structure? Check out these tried-and-true best practices developed by content professionals who have spent their careers creating the most efficient link paths.
- Always link to relevant content: Ensure your internal links connect pages that actually relate to each other. For example, a page titled “25 best investing strategies” might not be relevant to link to on a page about chocolate chip cookie recipes.
- Use descriptive anchor text: Make sure your anchor text is both accurate and descriptive. Aim for clarity and avoid vague phrases like “click here.”
- Vary your anchor text: While relevant keywords are essential, a natural mix of anchor text variations can make your linking appear more organic — so don’t just use the same phrases over and over again.
- Consider user experience: Integrate internal links seamlessly within your content — keeping in mind page and post structure — to provide genuine value and encourage further exploration of related topics. Think about what a user might want to read next or what questions they might want answered.
- Don’t overlink: Excessive links on one page can overwhelm users, harm readability, and make it seem like you’re trying too hard — which sketches out readers and robots alike. Aim for a natural density of relevant links.
- Use “dofollow” links: By default, standard hyperlinks are “dofollow,” which allows link equity to be passed. Unless you have a specific reason for using “nofollow” for an internal link, ensure all links remain “dofollow” to maximize SEO benefits.
Pro tip: A few well-placed, high-value internal links are far more effective than a lot of weak or irrelevant links. Always choose quality over quantity!
Go Forth and Link Away
Now that you’ve learned what makes a great internal linking structure, it’s time to go forth and link. Connect those pages strategically, and you’ll roll out the red carpet for site visitors and search engines.
If this guide looked slightly intimidating (or time-consuming), don’t click away just yet. At Siege Media, our SEO experts can provide the support your team needs to scale the SERP. Don’t let valuable traffic slip through the cracks — let’s discuss how we can help your business grow with SEO.
