What is internal link building?

It describes all the hyperlinks between pages, posts in the same domain name; it is important for both users and search engines to know exactly what other pages and posts you have in your website and blog.

The importance of internal linking.

Internal link building in the past few years had no strong effect in your search engine ranking, other than passing link juice from your home page to your deep linking and sub-pages. But today 2013 and after all the changes made in search engines algorithms, it become very important to have the best natural internal navigation.

First of all there are 2 reasons for internal link building:

1. User friendly and easy navigation, to give our audience a good idea what we have in the site, and allow our readers to find more useful information they may seek. It also allows users to easily navigate through your website.

2. Search engines use internal linking to go through all your web pages, index them, and rank each page in the proper ranking depend of the search term each page target, and the relevance and popularity of each page.

In an HTML website you will need to build all the internal linking manually, and the best way to do so is by creating categories, and devides your main topic into more specific topics, then building hierarchy between all your pages and your main page.

Taking in consideration that each page in your website must have a maximum internal and external links, we recommend that external links must not exceed the number 20, and internal links must be at maximum 15.

But because most websites today are based on WordPress and other blogging platforms we will talk here only about blogs.

With blogs it is easier and almost automated to have a proper internal linking, starting by using categories, then listing each new post under the proper category, and listing your categories in your main page. This way you will have the best SEO hierarchy of all your deep links.

And when you have new pages, you can also have the same, having the pages under the proper category, and you can also have a top navigation menu to only your pages.

Internal linking for SEO

Internal link building is very important for SEO, search engine need a crawlable linking structure so they can crawl all of your links going from index page and deeper into all your deep links.

If you want to prevent search engines from crawling a specific link, you can do it through the Robot.txt file, but if you have a page in your website with too many external links, it is better to have a nofollow attribute when linking to that page and from that page, to prevent search engines from going to all of those links.

The importance of internal link building for SEO purposes.

Internal link building establish a roadmap for search engine spiders and direct them to visit and crawl all your pages and posts, and provide an architecture to your pages and pass link juice ( ranking juice) between all of your pages.

Here is how a search engine spider works:

Let’s assume that a SE spider find your link on some page, then it visit your home page; it finds links on your home page to sub-pages, then it visit and index each of your subpages, and find more links on your subpages to more deeper pages, again it visit and index each link, and so on.

What are the most important pages you need to have for SEO?

There are some very important pages you must have in your website for users and mostly for SEO purposes:

1. Privacy page,  to guarantee privacy protection of your audience

2. Contact page

3. About Page

4. Sitemap page. Having a sitemap.xml is very important, it is the guaranteed way to insure search engine spider will crawl all of our pages and index them, with blogging platform you can have a plug-in to create and automatically update this page.

The best structure of internal linking is: pyramid structure where all begin in the home page, and goes to categories and sub-pages and you can link from sub-pages to deeper pages or posts, and always link back from all pages and posts back to home page.

Anchor text for internal linking.

In today’s SEO and after all the updates with Google search algorithm, now it is a bad idea to use anchor text to link to your home page from other pages in your domain. But you can and it is much recommended to use anchor text to link to sub-pages and categories and posts.

So look at this blog menu, at the top, you can see that I am linking to my pages using keywords, and you can have as many menus as your design allow. And in the footer you can have the SEO menu that you want the spider to follow.