An internal link is a link from one page or post on your site to another page or post on your site. As an example, maybe you have a link in the text of your homepage that points to your About page. External links, on the other hand, are links within your pages or posts that point to pages on other websites, such as linking your visitors to a local restaurant’s site in a blog post.
The careful placement of internal links helps search engines better understand the relationships between the content on your site. Internal links also help establish a content hierarchy, which is helpful for both human visitors and search engines. Think about how helpful a well-organized navigation menu is on a site! Search engines tend to see pages that are more frequently linked to on your site as more authoritative, which can help improve their SEO rating when compared to other pages on your site.
Consider your most important pages and/or posts that you want your visitors to navigate to on your site. These are the pages that you will want to have internal links on. Maybe they are product or services pages, or perhaps it’s a category page for your blog, or even a popular standalone blog post. Just be sure that the page you’re linking to is relevant, within the context of what a visitor is currently reading. For example, if you include an internal link to your page offering your tarot card reading service in your blog post that discusses how you learned about tarot cards.
The text you select to be the clickable link, itself, can impact the SEO rating of the link’s destination page. This hyperlinked text, called the anchor text, should be descriptive and ideally, include a keyword. For example, if you have a car detailing business and you wanted to link to your pricing page from within a blog post, you might select “car detailing pricing” as your anchor text. Using this phrase as the anchor text, which is a great keyword on its own, not only helps improve the SEO rank for your pricing page, but it’s also descriptive for the reader so they can understand what that link is about.
It’s also best practice to place your internal links towards the top of your post or page. By having the links towards the top of your content, it can help keep visitors more engaged and increase the time visitors spend on your site as they read. As people spend more time reading your pages and posts, search engines learn that the content offers value to visitors, giving your content a better chance at improved rankings for providing a good experience.
Regardless of whether a link on your site is internal or external, the important thing to remember is that you want it to be helpful, descriptive, and serve a purpose for your visitors. And remember, adding too many links can be a distraction for readers. As explained previously in the course, optimizing your site for search engines is a balance with optimizing it for your human visitors.
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