What Are Internal Links?

Anytime I do an SEO audit, I recommend taking advantage of internal links. Let me explain what internal links are and how to use them.

What are Internal Links?

Internal links are links to other pages or posts on your website. They connect your content, helping Google and your visitors to navigate through your website.

Internal links include links in your main navigation, on your pages, in your sidebars, and in the footer.

How Do Internal Links Affect SEO?

To know how internal links affect your search engine optimization, let’s wait for a moment to talk about how Google analyzes your website.

Google’s “bot” is a technology that Google uses to navigate through your website, reads it, and understands what’s on it.  The Google bot works by loading your home page, scanning it, and then following the links on that page to other parts of your website.

Then, it follows links on those pages to other pages, until it has crawled through everything it can find.

This means that links within your website from one page to another are really important for Google to find all of your content.

Help Google crawl your website

Like I mentioned earlier, Google uses links to crawl throughout your website.  When you link to a page or blog post within your site, you’re helping Google to find and index all of your content.

Indicate your most important pages

Google’s analysis considers which pages on your website are linked to most often throughout your website.  This indicates to Google which pages are the most important and helpful.

Google may use internal linking to determine things like Site links in search results.