Using Internal Links to Improve Rank

Internal links are hyperlinks that point to other pages on the same domain. In other words, internal links help guide a visitor through a website. Best SEO practices for internal linking require that these links utilize normal hyperlinking code, and always employ descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text (the text used to describe the link).

Why Use Internal Links?

Internal links have three main purposes. The first is that they serve as navigation within a website, directing visitors from one related page to another. Internal links spread “link juice,” or page importance, throughout the website, and also help define a website’s hierarchy of information.

Proper Use of Internal Links

Search engine “spiders” are programs that explore the Internet, crawling websites and following an ever-expanding web of links like new threads on a spider web. For this reason, it is essential that all websites use internal linking to provide search engine pathways for spiders to follow:

Without proper internal linking, parts of a website may be invisible – and therefore impossible for search engines to index. In the above image, Google’s spider is visiting Website A. From the homepage, the spider can easily visit Pages B and E, but Pages D and C are not linked, and the spider therefore cannot see them. No matter how keyword rich or well optimized these pages are, they will not be indexed, and therefore will not be included in Google’s search results.

SEO Best Practice

The ideal website layout is organized like a pyramid outline, transitioning from general subjects to more defined topics:

The above pyramid structure also serves as good SEO practice because it has the fewest possible connections between the homepage (the large dot) and specific-subject pages (the smallest dots). This allows link juice, or a page’s importance based on search engine ranking, to trickle down throughout the site without becoming unnecessarily diluted.

Internal Link Structure

Internal links should follow the same format as any other hyperlink:

This structure is standard, and therefore easily understood by the search engines. The spiders will follow this link to the referenced page, and from there continue on to explore other internal links.

Be aware that search engine spiders cannot follow all link types. If the spider cannot follow an internal link, it cannot index that page. Avoid the following link formats that are unfriendly to most search engines:

• Pages that are not internally linked, and can only be discovered via site search
• Links contained within frames or I-frames
• Links that are accessible only through submission forms
• Links that exist on a page with more than 150 links
• Links embedded in Java applets, Flash code, other plug-ins, or built with Javascript
• Links to pages that have been blocked via the Mega Robots tag or in the Robots.txt file