Puproses of Using Internal Links

Internal links have a few functions that improve UX (User Experience) and crawlability.
1. Creates Easy Navigation
Internal links help users navigate a website. This typically leads to a higher level of engagement and dwell time, as the links can act as a CTA (Call To Action).
2. Creates Information Hierarchy
Internal links also allow you to outline your information hierarchy and distribute link value to important pages. It also helps build page authority.
3. Improves Crawl Budget
Internal links help crawlers discover different pages on your website. This is especially important if you haven’t registered a certain page in your site map. Internal links ultimately help crawlers find and index your page more quickly, which means higher visibility and increases the likelihood of higher ranking in SERPs.

How to Get the Most out of Your Internal Links
There are a few different ways that you can optimize your internal link strategy. Below are a few key approaches.
1. Develop and Expand Upon Your Website Content
This is a sure-fire way to expand your network of internal links. Creating more fresh and interesting content on your website means you’ll have more pages to link to.
Forget ‘content siloing’ or complex layers of pages, this way is simple and more effective.
2. Make Sure Links Are Relevant
You need to make sure you contextualize your internal links. Make sure they are related to the content.
After all, you should be catering primarily to the user, not the algorithm.
If you include links to relevant pages, the end-user is more likely to engage with content elsewhere on your site, which also means a higher dwell time.
3. Don’t Use Too Many Internal Links
It might be tempting to go overboard with internal links, but remember, it’s about quality over quantity. One or two internal links will be more effective than ten. Avoid appearing as spammy.
4. Use Anchor Text
Using anchor text that is natural and easy to understand is an effective linking strategy. But, remember not to over-optimize, otherwise, this will land you in trouble with the Penguin update.
5. Link Deep into Your Website’s Content
You need to prioritize links that delve deeper into your website’s content rather than providing a link to the homepage, as users should be able to navigate there via breadcrumbs.
6. Use Follow Links
In the modern SEO landscape, it is preferable to use do-follow links rather than no-follow links. Linking needs to be natural and have an easy flow throughout your website.

The importance of Internal Links for SEO

Google follows links to discover content on websites and to rank this content in the search results. If a post or page gets a lot of links, this is a signal to Google that it’s an essential or high-value article. This counts for internal as well as external links.

Internal linking is something you control as a site owner. With the correct internal links, you’ll guide your visitors and Google to your most important pages.

Relationships between content

Google crawls websites by following links, internal and external, using a bot called Googlebot. This bot arrives at the website’s homepage, renders the page, and follows the first link. By following links, Google can work out the relationship between the various pages, posts, and other content. This way, Google finds out which pages on your site cover a similar subject matter.

For example, you’ll see links to the ‘Content SEO’, ‘Internal linking’, and ‘Site structure’ tags on top of this post. We make sure Google understands that the content on those pages is related to the content of this post by adding these links.

Link value

In addition to understanding the relationship between content, Google divides link value between all links on a web page. Often, the homepage of a website has the most significant link value because it has the most backlinks. That link value will be shared between all the links found on that homepage. The link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page, and so on.

Therefore, your newest blog posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage instead of only on the category page. And Google will find recent posts quicker if they’re linked to from the homepage.

When you get the concept that links pass their link value on, you’ll understand that more links to a post mean more value. Because Google deems a page that gets lots of valuable links as more important, you’ll increase the chance of that page ranking.