Why Practice Internal Link Building

Internal link building is a fundamental aspect of the total link building process, and one that doesn’t get as much attention as brining links in from other sites. While webmasters often scramble around to get the ever-coveted inbound link from high-quality sites, they neglect something that can also be effective (albeit not quite as much) in terms of search engine ranking–internal link building.

Everything starts with providing value and quality to your visitors, and internal linking helps with this as well as it makes your site more user-friendly. By following your internal links, your visitors can quickly get suggestions and find other content related to the topic they want to read more about. This also contributes to your site obtaining an expert-like status.

In the present day, it’s known that inbound links are a major factor in determining how high your website will rank with the search engines. While it’s true that internal link building doesn’t play quite as much an important role, it does have significant impact on how well you will do with the search engines, simply because they are a very convenient means of redirecting some of the "juice" of incoming links from one page to another within your site. In order to maximize their effectiveness, you need to make sure that the anchor text is that of the keywords or keyword phrases that you want to target (this is the same principle for backlinks as well). This ensures that the search engines will see these terms as more important, and you will squeeze the link juice out of every link. Internal links are also a way to boost some of the poorer performing pages within your website. You can strengthen the lower-ranking pages with internal links from your pages that rank better. Naturally, this isn’t quite the same thing as getting incoming links to that page or those pages, but it will make a difference.

Remember that when you are establishing your internal link building, you must follow a sound navigation structure. If you don’t have this in place, you will not get the full benefits of internal links. The navigation should be simple for both the visitors to your site and the search engines. Once again, you can get people to your site through following only the guidelines of high-ranking with search engines. But the visitors will not stay there unless you provide them a reason to. The reasons are valuable content, ease in navigation, and the right visual appeal. It has been shown that Internet users like links within the text body of a page more than those on the naviagtion bar so keep that in mind as well.