What is internal link building?

When people talk about link building, they are almost always referring to building links from external websites to yours. This isn’t entirely accurate, as internal link building is extremely important. This is because Google crawls websites using internal links. Google’s bot enters via your homepage and then clicks on all sorts of links found on your homepage. So, if the internal links aren’t set up properly, Google will never be able to crawl your website correctly. Furthermore, internal links also ensure that visitors can easily find their way around your website.

What does internal link building involve?

• In-content links
• Header menu
• Breadcrumbs
• Footer links

These four different types of internal links are all crucial to the proper functioning of a website and each has its own specific purpose. However, the aim of the various internal links is the same: to make it easy for both visitors and Google to navigate through your website.

In-content links are links embedded within the text. For example: German link building. In-content links are of interest to Google because they are surrounded by context. Thanks to this context, Google can determine whether it makes sense for the word ‘link building’ in this paragraph to be a link or not. When it makes sense for a particular word to be linked, Google ranks it higher, and this also improves the user-friendliness of your website.

The header menu is the central menu of your website. This menu contains all your key categories and other important pages. A key feature of the header menu is that it appears on every page of your website; consequently, every page in your header menu already has at least as many internal links as there are pages on your website. This number of internal links automatically gives each page a relatively high value. However, there is certainly a difference between a page appearing right at the top left of the menu and one tucked away at the bottom: Google also reads from top to bottom and from left to right. A major difference compared to in-content links is that there is no context in the header menu, so Google finds it harder to understand what a link means.

Breadcrumbs are the path you follow to reach a page. These are usually displayed at the top of the page you are currently viewing. For example, on our page about conversion optimisation, you will see the following path:
If you’re looking for this page, these are the steps you’ve probably followed to get here from the homepage. Put simply, the breadcrumb trail is your navigation through the website. The breadcrumb trail ensures that visitors can click back to the parent category – or even further back – in a single click. It’s also useful for Google, as it helps them better understand which pages are related to one another, and that Conversion Optimisation is part of Search Engine Optimisation.

Footer links are the links you see in the footer. These are usually practical links, such as contact details, payment methods and the terms and conditions. In addition to these practical elements, you can also use the footer to put certain categories or landing pages in the spotlight. This is because, just like the header menu, the footer appears on every page, meaning that pages linked in the footer automatically gain a significant number of additional inbound links. As with the links in the header menu, these links lack context. However, unlike in the header menu, it is easy to place specific landing pages in the footer that would not normally fit in the header menu.

The benefits of internal link building

The main benefit has already been mentioned: the visitor experience. By implementing a proper internal linking structure – a form of on-page optimisation – a visitor can easily navigate through your website and quickly find what they are looking for. This ensures a pleasant experience, thereby increasing the likelihood of conversion.

On the other hand, it is also crucial for Google, for a number of reasons.

1. The crawl budget
Google operates a crawl budget. The crawl budget is a specific amount of time and effort that Google is willing to devote to your website. It is up to the website administrator to utilise this budget as effectively as possible so that Google is directed to the right pages, pays the most attention to the most important pages and, very importantly, gives less attention to less important pages.
By utilising different types of inbound links, you can effectively guide Google towards the most important pages so that they are crawled most frequently. You can increase your crawl budget through external link building, amongst other methods .

2. Distribution of authority
You are constantly striving to improve your website. You publish new content, build new external links and refine your website’s layout. All these activities ensure that your domain authority increases, giving your website, as it were, ever-greater weight. You want to distribute this weight as effectively as possible across the pages on your website, whilst certainly giving your most important converting pages the most attention: the most numerous and most prominent inbound links. In this way, Google recognises that these pages are very important to the website and will assign greater value to them.

3. Preventing orphan pages
An orphan page is a page without any inbound links. If a page has no inbound links whatsoever, Google will not see it and will therefore ignore it. Normally, you’ll want to avoid this, as the page will never rank under these circumstances.

Anchor texts

Anchor text is the piece of linked text. For example: Our Services. Just as with external link building, it is very important to pay attention to this. Unlike with external link building, you cannot receive a penalty for internal links, but Google may devalue or ignore internal links if your anchor text distribution is unbalanced. The biggest culprit here is ‘Exact Match’ anchor text. These are anchor texts that match exactly the ‘money keyword’ of the page you’re linking to. Suppose you sell black laptop bags. If you create a link every time these three words appear on the website, this could be seen as keyword spam. Definitely something to avoid!
The most important thing with anchor text is to ensure a good balance and not to use the same text every time. Don’t make everything branded, and don’t make everything an exact match. As long as you vary your anchor text, there will be no risk of a penalty or the link losing value.

 

Looking to outsource link building?

Don’t have time to get started on your link structure? Then outsource your link building to Traffic Today. We have an extensive network, which means we can always find the right match between a partner and your business.