We've looked at external links and how we can use other websites, sparingly, to enhance our visitors' experience on our site. Our aim is obviously to delight our customers and make them hang around on our site for as long as possible. In fact, we want them to promote it and tell their friends, right?

Internal Links

Internal links are those links that go between the pages of your website. These are extremely important as they carry several important benefits.

Let's look at it from a search engine perspective. I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of the search engine algorithms, but several things you can assume are true.

The search engines need to be able to find all your content.

How do they find it? They crawl all the pages they know about, including pages they have indexed already, as well as pages provided in your sitemap.

What they also do is follow links in your pages and posts to discover new pages and posts that they have not yet indexed. As I said, the sitemap is one avenue, menus are another and of course internal links within your pages.

Some of your pages may pull in more visitors than others because of the popularity of the keyword used. It doesn't mean your other pages shouldn't benefit too though. By creating links between your pages you are able to harness the popularity of one page to send visitors to others which maybe aren't performing as well. Of course ensure those other pages have the same quality of content.

As well as being able to direct web crawlers to all your content, search engines also see internal links as a positive thing as it shows you are offering your site visitors a fuller experience. It shows there is depth to your content which should be of benefit to visitors who are looking for content based on their keyword search. Of course ensure that the pages you link are relevant to one another. It won't do you much good to link your cake baking site to a site about changing your lube oil.

So how do we maintain those internal links?