What is Internal Linking?

Internal linking is the linking of posts or articles within the same domain. Means one page of your website connects with another page of the same site. That means the internal linking enhances the user experience as the user can find the complete information related to the article.

Internal Linking also passes PageRank from one page to another, that will improve domain authority and boost SEO of the website.

It also helps a search engine like Google to understand the structure of your website. All the anchor links provide additional information to the search engine to rank the article in its search results. That’s why internal links help a website determine the context and rank it accordingly.

Internal Linking and SEO.

Suppose you wrote many quality articles and a few of the top ranks in the Google search results. That indicates the content that ranks in the search results has an authority called page authority. This page authority can be passed to the other pages using internal linking.

When the crawler crawls your website, it also crawls the internal links provided in the article. The anchor text provided in the content will help to understand all about the linked content.

Hierarchy for Internal Linking.

When you start a website, there should be a map in your mind with proper structure. This structure may be of different level according to the need of content like 2 level structure, 3 level or 4, most of the website has 3 level structure. For your website, it may be as per your need.

How to perform Internal Linking in WordPress?

WordPress CMS enables you to perform internal linking easily. You have to

• select the text as anchor text
• Click on the chain/link button
• search the Topic and link

Please don’t click on the open in new tab or nofollow to pass the link juice. When you click on the open in a new tab, it will automatically add some rel-tag that prohibits passing link juice. The link should be open in the same window for interlinking in WordPress.

Internal Linking in HTML for Blogger and other CMS.

When you’re on platforms like Blogger or other HTML theme pages, you can follow the practice with the help of HTML. With the help of HTML, one can connect an article to the other in the following way.

<a href="/internal-link/>anchor text for the internal link</a>

Some users use internal links like click here, don’t follow the practice discussed above. It is not providing additional information to the crawler about your interlinked article. The text that links one content to another is called anchor text. And anchor text plays a vital role in website SEO.

If you want to nofollow a content page of your website, you can use the nofollow tag as

<a href="/internal-link/ rel="nofollow">internal link that should not index</a>.

This content may be like a log-in page, pages you don’t want to index. Along with nofollow, you can use the noindex robots tag with such pages(pages that shouldn’t index).

Internal links generated by JS, flash, etc.

Do not use internal links generated by javascript etc. A search engine can’t control links generated by javascript or flash etc.

Try to add HTML links to the webpage. Both practices provided above, like WordPress interlinking and HTML interlinking, follow the HTML method.

Internal broken links

Broken links are harmful to the user experience as well as SEO. When a user clicks on a link and responds to an error 404 page, it indicates that the website or blog doesn’t care about posts or pages.

Broken links may be a result of deleted pages, pages whose permalink/slug has been changed. When you do so, redirect that page or remove the link that points to the deleted content.

Check broken internal links of the website from time to time. For this, you can use the ahrefs webmaster tool. That will detect and tells you all the internal links of your website.

This tool will audit almost all the matric of the website that helps in understanding the website structure, broken links, expired links, etc.

As we already discussed, internal links connect pages within the website. When we provide a link to another website in our article or some other websites, provide our link on their website, will-called as an external link. Internal links help a website with its structure, and if a webpage gets external links on some of the articles. It will boost the authority of that page.

External links help a search engine to understand the content, niche, and type of the content. These links help a search engine to understand all the factors about the article.

Conclusion

With the help of this article, we can easily understand the importance of internal linking of the content that helps a website in the following ways.

• Anchor links help Google to understand the context of the linked page/s,
• Pass page authority to other pages,
• Reduce bounce rate of the website,
• Boost SEO of the website

So we must follow the practice of internal linking of a website.

I hope this article will help you in understanding internal linking. In case of any doubt, query or suggestion, please ask in the comment section provided below.

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