Digital Marketing » Blog » Search Engine Optimisation Batman has Robin, Sherlock has Watson, Hans has Chewbacca, and backlinks have internal links. Internal links are a type of hyperlink that points to or targets pages on the same domain. In simple English, an internal link is a link that points to another page within the same website. Here’s a snippet and breakdown of what that code looks like: <a href=”https://yourdomain.com/”>YourDomainName</a> These kind of links are useful for 3 reasons: Much like a spider that builds its web in an intertwined and interconnected way, knowing all paths that lead from every single strand, so is Google. Internal linking is the strands on which Google (the spider) is able to discover all paths, new content and old, on your website. Google uses internal links to discover new content. So what if we don’t do this? Let’s say you create a new piece of content, and we make the assumption that it isn’t available on your sitemap and doesn’t have any backlinks – essentially making it an orphan page. There are no paths from which Google can access your new content, which in turn means no traffic. Here’s a snippet from Google: “The first step is finding out what pages exist on the web. There isn’t a central registry of all web pages, so Google must constantly search for new pages and add them to its list of known pages. This process of discovery is called crawling.” Think of a family tree, where the sole ancestor branches out into multiple branches, or better yet a pyramid, narrow on the top and broad as you go further down. In this scenario, the homepage would be on the top, followed by all the most important pages all the way down to the least important page. This structure allows for least possible links between the homepage and any other given page, allowing for link equity to flow throughout the entire site, in turn increasing the ranking potential for any given page. This structure is common on many high performing websites like Amazon and Apple. Classification is defined as the arrangement of anything in taxonomic groups according to their observed similarities. For example: Imagine we have a website about cars, in which we have different type of cars, one way we could classify and categorise these cars would be as follows: You will immediately be able to tell that there are two distinct classifications: There are various benefits to this sort of classification: As an added benefit, with the improvement of machine learning and various other technologies employed by website crawlers, this structure also helps crawlers understand the context of your content better. Internal linking is nowhere as complex as rocket science or quantum physics. You simply need to employ a logical, hierarchical site structure and have your internal linking follow the same structure – at least on a basic level. You can then strategically link from your ‘traffic-heavy’ pages to those that need a little help. Here are a few guidelines to help with internal linking: And here’s a small secret, don’t tell anyone though. If you’re ever looking for internal linking inspiration, just look at your favourite Wikipedia page. The force is strong with this one.
SEO Basics – Internal Linking
So What are internal links?
Why are Internal Links Important for SEO?
So how do we set up the ideal internal link structure?
The art of classification
Posted By Bruce Clay on May 7th, 2020 in Search Engine Optimisation