What is Internal Linking?

Internal linking refers to links that direct website visitors to another page of your website. 

Take this flagrant internal link as an example:  We provide professional SEO services.

The term "professional SEO services" contains hypertext, and if clicked on you will be directed to another page within this website.  Because the link directs you to a page within this site, it is considered an internal link.

This is not the same as one way link building, which is a technique to gain external links - links from other websites to your website. 

Internal linking is a great way to increase a page's anchor text links, which tell search engines what your page is about and help increase that page's ranking for specific terms.  In the previous example, 'professional SEO services' is the anchor text.

How is Internal Linking Beneficial?

Internal linking is designed to help website visitors easily navigate through your site, finding relevant information as they learn more about your product or services.  A well designed internal linking structure flows naturally so that relevant pages are linked to other relevant pages. 

Internal linking also serves to pass 'link juice' from one page to another.  Link juice refers abstractly to the amount of external links coming into your site and the 'power' of these links.  Links from pages with higher page ranks are considered to have more link juice.  Although it is an arbitrary term, meaning no definite value can be assigned to a pages 'link juice', it can be explained in the following equation:  Link Juice / # of links = amount of link juice passed through links.  For example:

Lets say a page has an arbitrary link juice amount of 100

If that page has 10 links:  100 / 10 = 10

                                      10 'points' of link juice will be passed to each page

If that page has 100 links: 100/100 = 1

                                       1 point of link juice will be passed to each page

The trick to internal linking is developing a specific architecture for your site.  I prefer a 3 tiered system.

Tier 1:  You index page - the main page of your site, which should have the most link juice.

Tier 2:  Pages optimized for competitive keyword phrases.

Tier 3:  Pages optimized for less-competitive keyword phrases.

Most pages should link to your Tier 1 page.  Tier 1 pages should link to Tier 2 pages.  Tier 2 pages should link to Tier 1, 2, and 3 pages.  Tier 3 pages should link to Tier 1, 2, and 3 pages. 

Juicing a Page

If you'd like to have a page indexed or you'd like to stress a particular keyword phrase, you should link a page directly from Tier 1.  The trick is to limit the amount of links leaving your main page, so that you retain the most amount of link juice.

I recommend linking out to no more than 5 web pages per page (this does not include link bars that are part of your site's template.  It's a good idea to limit the number of links to 3 initially, so that you can link to new web pages as your site continues to grow. 

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