A Complete Guide on Internal Linking for SEO

Internal links play an essential role in any SEO strategy. How and where you place your internal links has an impact on how users and search engines understand your site. Essentially, internal links enhance crawlability, which helps improve your search ranking and boost authority.

Types of Internal Links

• Navigational links: Appear in main menus or sidebars

• Contextual links: Embedded within on-page text

• Image links: Hyperlinked images

• Footer links: Placed in the site’s footer area

• Sidebar links: Located in the sidebar for easy navigation

• Breadcrumb links: Show a page’s location within the site hierarchy

• In-content call-to-action (CTA) links: Prompt conversions or actions within the text

What are Internal Links?

Internal links are hyperlinks that point to the same domain. In other words, internal links point or link to another page on the same website.

Why are Internal Links Important for SEO and GEO?

Internal links are important for four main reasons:

1. They allow users to navigate across the site (increasing engagement rate and reducing bounce rate).

2. They help search engines like Google find, index, and understand pages on your site.

3. They establish a hierarchy and spread link equity across the site.

4. They provide more context to content, which is what AI search models are looking for.

Let’s look into each point in more detail:

User Experience and Website Navigation

Internal links enhance user experience as they guide users across the site to relevant content. Internal linking encourages users to stay on the website for longer, which increases engagement time, page views, and sessions whilst decreasing bounce rates.

Search engines also follow the same links to understand your site’s structure. In turn, they can prioritise your most valuable pages. They look out for strong internal linking, such as links to product pages, FAQs, or blog posts.

Aside from improving your SEO, a high engagement rate signals to AI models that your content is useful and could increase your chances of ending up in AI results.

Page Indexing

Search engines can’t crawl and index content if it’s not linked. If a page has no links pointing to it, it becomes orphaned content, making it almost invisible to crawlers. This means your new content could potentially stay hidden if it is not properly linked somewhere. A strong and consistent internal linking strategy enhances crawl paths and ensures all new pages are accessible.

Website Hierarchy and Link Equity

Internal linking helps Google identify which pages are the most important. Crawlers identify how your pages connect, which allows them to interpret the content hierarchy of the site. An example of traditional internal linking is the following: homepage → category → product.

From an SEO and GEO standpoint, strong internal linking also enhances topical relevance.

How to Build Your Internal Linking Strategy

Plan Your Site Structure

Plan the structure of your site: You need to identify your main and supporting pages. Site structure usually looks like this:

• Top: Homepage

• Middle: Service or cluster pages

• Bottom: Specific content pages (articles, guides, FAQs, or landing pages that add context to your main topics)

Build a Content Hub

Content hubs are an excellent way of structuring your website into hierarchical clusters. The top pages, often called “pillar” or “hub” pages, act as comprehensive guides on broad topics. These pages link out to more specific “cluster” pages, which cover subtopics in greater detail.

• Pillar Pages: Identify your core pages (aka pillar pages). These pages should target high-volume, short-tail keywords. These are your comprehensive pages that cover broad, high-volume topics; there, you can build topic clusters.

• Topic Clusters: Create more pages that target specific, long-tail, and niche keywords. Each cluster page should link back to the pillar page.

This structure not only improves user experience by making it easier for visitors to navigate your site, but it also signals to search engines the depth and relevance of your content. By interlinking related pages, you can distribute link equity throughout your site, increase the time users spend exploring your content, and improve rankings for multiple related keywords.

When creating a content hub, start by identifying a core topic that aligns with your business goals. Then, develop supporting content that does the following:

• Answers specific questions

• Addresses pain points

• Provides actionable insights related to the topic

Over time, a well-planned hub can position your site as an authority in your niche, attract organic traffic, and support long-term SEO growth.

Content hubs are also an excellent way to plan and execute other types of content, such as FAQ pages, case studies, how-to pages, and more. These pages aren’t just effective in a linking strategy, but they also help with appearing in AI search. This is because these types of content are more conversational and contextualise your site.

Choose the Right Anchor Text

Anchor text is clickable text; these phrases are hyperlinked to other pages on your site (or other sites if you want to do external linking). Make sure the clickable phrases are relevant keywords and link back to the appropriate page.

For example, if you own a lighting business and you write a blog titled “How to Install Pendant Lights”, you can create a clickable link in the content where the phrase “pendant light” is mentioned and hyperlink it back to your main Pendant Light page. However, it’s important not to keyword stuff or link stuff; you don’t need to link back to the same page every time its keyword comes up.

Navigational Links

Your main navigation bar should have links to the pillar pages. These are your main product or service pages that you want users to click on. These links contextualise your site structure for both users and search engines, helping visitors find key content quickly and improving overall SEO.

Contextual Links

Aside from the main navigation menu, it’s important you add other contextual links within the content. This signals to Google which pages are related. Links can be added in the following ways:

• Anchor text

• “Read more” blogs at the end of your post

• In a drop-down menu

It’s important you show search engines like Google which pages offer cornerstone content by ensuring your main cornerstone content incorporates all links to your individual posts (part of the cluster topics). These individual posts should also link back to the main cornerstone content.