As a business owner or someone who has a website, you want to increase a website’s value in order to achieve your goals. Whether it is getting more sales, subscribers, or browsers, there are certain things to do to increase the value of your website. One of which is internal linking, which involves linking to pages within the same domain or website. By the end of this post, you will understand how internal linking is done and what are some advantages to internal linking.

1)      Usability

Perhaps one of most important reasons for doing internal linking is increased usability for your website’s users. You may have browsed websites in the past where each page you land on, there is a link or links within the content of that webpage that brings you to more content relevant to what you’re looking for. This is exactly what a webpage is supposed to do – provide the user with relevant content – and by using links that bring the user to other parts of the website, you easily direct them to content they want to see.

Having said that, it is important to make sure what you link together is relevant. For example, on the ‘Company’ page you might want to link to your ‘Contact’, ‘About Us’ or ‘Services’ pages. Not only will internal linking help clients look for content and browse through your website, but it will increase the time they spend on your website and thus potential conversions.

2)      Link Juice and Page Rank

Link juice is the amount of credibility one webpage passes on to another in the form of a link. If one webpage links to another, it can be thought of as a vote for the linked webpage. Therefore, the more credibility a webpage has that links to another, the better it is for the linked webpage. What determines credibility is a number of factors, but generally they would all contribute to one measurement called Page Rank, which Google developed to evaluate web pages. The higher the Page Rank, the more credibility there is. Google tends to value high Page Rank pages and rewards them with higher rankings. This is why website owners care about Page Rank.

You might already have figured out why internal links can help your website in the form of passing on link juice. If one of your pages has great credibility, you can use it to pass on link juice to newer pages or pages with low Page Rank. This will make it easier to promote the newer page.

3)      Guide Crawlers

There is a very good reason why search engine robots are called spiders. Not only because they crawl and index your website, but also because they love crawling webs. By doing internal links on your website, you are providing a ‘spider web’ for them to crawl as your webpages will be interlinked with each other. This is a great environment for them to find content on your website and index them to search engines. If your website had all standalone pages, it would take them longer to reach the content.

4)      Keyword Relevancy

Each link has some content in which they link, whether it is text or images. In regards to text, you can use internal links as an opportunity to increase the keyword relevancy of your website. For example, let’s say you sell running shoes and a page on your website has content about a pair of Nike Shox. If you link from that page using terms that associate what your business does such as Nike Shox or Nike Running Shoes to other pages, it would show search engines that you talk about Nike Shoes on your website. Using it in an internal link is more effective than simply having those words present on your webpage.

5) Exposure

Depending on the size and navigation of your website, some pages may not get a great amount of exposure as some of your other pages. Nevertheless, it has content that you want people to see. In order to increase exposure of those pages, you can place internal links within the content of the more popular pages which will link to the less popular pages. This is also very useful for blogs. If you have one, it is a good idea to link to older posts so that they can be found again.

For all of the above reasons, internal linking is just as important as outbound and inbound linking. Wikipedia is a great example. One factor it is a popular website is that it has lots of internal links that provide easy navigation between content. Therefore, be sure to implement internal links to your website to improve the quality.