Information About Internal Links

byhildacbg

2.9K followers

Updated 10 years ago

Hello everybody. One of my tasks for this week is to put internal links in my website to improve its SEO. Since this is a topic I do not handle well, I tried to research a little bit on it. I found the following in this site http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

I hope this helps! Blessings!

Hilda

Internal Links

Internal Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) the same domain as the domain that the link exists on (source). In layman's terms, an internal link is one that points to another page on the same website.

Code Sample

<a href="http://www.same-domain.com/" title="Keyword Text">Keyword Text</a>

Optimal Format

Use descriptive keywords in anchor text that give a sense of the topic or keywords the source page is trying to target.

What is an Internal Link?

Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They are commonly used in main navigation.

These type of links are useful for three reasons:

• They allow users to navigate a website.
• They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
• They help spread link juice (ranking power) around websites.

SEO Best Practice

Internal links are most useful for establishing site architecture and spreading link juice (URLs are also essential). For this reason, this section is about building an SEO-friendly site architecture with internal links.

On an individual page, search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their massive keyword–based indices. They also need to have access to a crawlable link structure—a structure that lets spiders browse the pathways of a website—in order to find all of the pages on a website. Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or burying their main link navigation in ways that search engines cannot access. This hinders their ability to get pages listed in the search engines' indices. Below is an illustration of how this problem can happen:

In the example above, Google's colorful spider has reached page "A" and sees internal links to pages "B" and "E." However important pages C and D might be to the site, the spider has no way to reach them—or even know they exist—because no direct, crawlable links point to those pages. As far as Google is concerned, these pages basically don’t exist–great content, good keyword targeting, and smart marketing don't make any difference at all if the spiders can't reach those pages in the first place.

The optimal structure for a website would look similar to a pyramid (where the big dot on the top is homepage):

This structure has the minimum amount of links possible between the homepage and any given page. This is helpful because it allows link juice (ranking power) to flow throughout the entire site, thus increasing the ranking potential for each page. This structure is common on many high-performing websites (like Amazon.com) in the form of category and subcategory systems.