How Internal Linking Can Affect Your SEO and Page Traffic

Internal linking refers to the linking strategy where you use your keywords, in other words anchor text, to create contextual linking within the body of your content to link from one page to another within your own website. Even though this linking strategy creates something beyond structural linking, many people don’t realize the related importance to SEO.

To start with; studies show that people are more likely to click on the links within the body of your content then navigation bar, or the side bar. Taking this factor into consideration, internal linking will actually enable you to send more traffic to the internal pages, which you believe should be more visible to your visitors.

This is related to visitor experience, and as you know search engines are now measuring this factor, as they are incorporating it to your page rank calculations. Not only from an SEO perspective, it is also important to keep your visitors within your site, interested in your content (or shall we say to your products and services). By using internal linking, you can send your visitors from one related product to another to increase the user experience within your site.

Another SEO factor you should consider is the distribution of the page rank through link juice. You can  accomplish this by using anchor text from higher PR pages to lower PR pages within your website to send more link juice to increase the PR value of your internal pages.

Here’s an example where I created an internal linking to another blog post, which is also related to this subject (as well as SEO), because it is talking about elements of internet marketing as in on-page optimization. Having said that, there are a few items that you should consider when you are implementing your internal linking strategy:

1. It is important to link to another related content on your site.
2. Less is more. You shouldn’t go haywire and fill the web pages of your site with internal links.
3. As mentioned above, use your keywords (anchor text)

This is not “The SEO Technique” to rank you higher and put you on the first page of search results. Just like any other SEO factors, it should be a part of your SEO Strategy to complete the whole picture.

Did you see a traffic boost in any of your internal pages after implementing Internal Linking? Have you analyzed your site to see if internal linking can boost PR to some of your web pages…? Feel free to share your experiences and ideas.