Internal linking is an important factor in search engine optimisation. Internal links can be useful for search engines to find new content, and as a voting mechanism to lift up your best content.
What is internal linking?
Internal linking can be defined as a link that’s a reference or part of the navigation on your own website, pointing to another webpage on your own domain. It’s basically a link going from one page on your domain, to another page on the same domain.Let’s show an example how a link to a popular page on SEO Specialist will look like:
• HMTL Example: SEO School (How a coder view it)
• Visual Example: www.SEOSpecialist.co.uk/school (How a visitor view it)
Jump links – A different type of internal links
Apart from the standard internal links as mentioned above, there are also “jump links”.They are ways of linking to a specific part of a webpage. The main difference between internal and jump links is that jump links refer to a certain element on the page.
With jump links, you need to define a name attribute, and place it in a link in order for it to work.
• HTML Example: Section B (How a coder view it)
• Visual Example: Section B (How a visitor view it)
Jump links can be useful for web pages with a large amount of text and headlines.
External vs. internal link juice
Getting new power from a link is often described as getting ‘link juice”. When comparing the power from internal and external links, it’s clear that external links to your website give way more impact on search engine ranking.However, you’ve got better access to your own website, and you can adjust, modify and tweak your internal links development as much as you want.
With external links, it’s harder to change and you don’t have any control over it. Therefore, the internal links are a good place with your internal search engine optimisation.
Importance of internal links
Internal linking is often overlooked and misunderstood by webmasters and website owners. They can help to show hierarchy of your website’s most important pages, spread the link juice to your main sub-pages and simplify navigation.Tweaking your internal links
Tweaking the internal linking structure can be done by increasing or decreasing the amount of links to sub-pages. Make sure to have your basic search engine optimisation strategy in mind when adjusting your internal linking structure.Analyse your internal links
SEO Specialist suggests you analyse the following regarding internal links:• Which is the most used internal anchor text?
• Which sub-page is having the most internal links pointing to it?
• Do all the sub-pages have a link pointing to them?
Source; http://www.seospecialist.co.uk/school/analysis/internal-links/