Why Is Internal Linking Important?
Writing by Nick Stamoulis in Link Building
The search engines don’t rank websites as a whole in the SERPs; they rank individual pages. For most site owners, their homepage is going to get the lion’s share of traffic and inbound links, but that doesn’t mean that deeper internal pages can’t also be useful from an SEO standpoint. However, in order for those internal pages to effectively compete in the search results they need their own (albeit smaller) link portfolio and search engine trust. That’s where internal linking comes into play.
When one site links to another, it passes along “link juice,” or a little bit of that first site’s trust factor. The more external pages linking to a page on your website, the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the search engines (that’s why a strong link building strategy is so important). But internal pages of a website can also pass some of their link juice along to another internal page. For instance, when you put a link on your homepage to a product page, your homepage is lending some of its search engine trust factor to that product page. This helps build the authority of some of the deeper pages on your site that might not receive as many external links.
Internal linking is also important from a user perspective. Since the search engines will index and rank each page of your site, you have to treat each page as a potential landing page for your visitors. You never want to leave your traffic trapped on a random page of your site! Internal linking helps move traffic through your site, driving them down a pre-determined path of conversion. It minimizes confusion for the visitor, because they know what the next logical step to navigate through your site is. Internal linking also makes for happier user because they don’t have to always navigate back to your homepage to travel to another section of your site. That’s why a top level navigation and footer are so useful for creating a great user experience—it allows your visitors to click to any page on your site, no matter where they are.
Internal linking on your company blog is also important for both SEO and the user experience. You want to link related posts together to help further educate a reader and show off your industry knowledge. Linking between posts will also help keep a reader engaged for longer, since they can just jump from one post to another to find more information about a certain topic. Having a good internal linking system between your company blog and website will also help drive more targeted traffic over to your website and increase your chance of conversion.
