Internal Link Building: Why It Matters in SEO

So far, in our amazing TargetClick SEO posts we discussed link building in the evolution of SEO and the importance of practicing white hat link building. These posts highlight the importance of getting high authority sites to point back to your website. However, link building does not end on the outside of your site. Link building is also important internally to help spiders crawl your site and assist user experience. This is done by using internal links which are links that navigate users and spiders throughout a single site’s domain. Help Spiders Crawl Your Site If you have a healthy site, you want Google to be able the crawl and index the pages you have available. A good way to guide Google is through link building and using followed links instead of no follow. Followed links tell search engines, “Hey, follow me. I will bring you to an important page that is worthy of your crawling time.” Using internal link building is excellent when you are trying to highlight a new page with fresh content. Furthermore, by building an effective internal link strategy you are able to spread “link juice” around your site, benefiting all pages. User Experience in Mind Now that we have covered how internal link building can help Google crawl your site, let’s talk about one of the most important aspects--user experience. It’s all fine and dandy if Google indexes a page and brings users to that particular page, but what if they don’t have a good user experience? Odds are they won’t further search your site or even revisit. This is why user experience needs to be in the forefront of every SEO’s mind. Link building assists user experience by providing helpful links that may come across the users mind as they are interacting with the material on a site. The link could even provide an opportunity to lead the user to a page that they may not have thought of before. For example, earlier in my post I linked to other blog posts on our site. This was strategically done for a few reasons.

1. Not leave anyone who is interested in reading the posts at a dead-end or at the mercy of finding the post themselves.
2. Provide opportunities to convert users to other areas of the site.
3. Using descriptive anchor text so users and spiders know what they are going to find when they follow one of these links.
4. Promote my co-workers' blogs.

Stay Natural My Friends Link building is something that is easy and simple to do. Building links internally should always come naturally the throughout content of a page.  It should never be forced. On the flipside, misusing internal links through forcing links on a page could hinder the user experience and cause the user to leave. Another idea to keep in mind is double-checking that you are sending the user to the correct, live link. Nothing is worse than sending the user to a dead-end or an irrelevant page. While writing or evaluating content, challenge yourself to think of possibilities to link to other pages on your site. Remember to share the love of link building along with the benefits it provides.