4 Benefits of Internal Linking In SEO

Every website owner should be aware of the multiple benefits that come along with having plenty of internal links throughout their site.

A lot of people underestimate the power they have on a website, but in reality, internal links will help with search engine rankings, increased traffic, decreased bounce rate, and better indexing. We will cover how internal links actually affect websites and go through the benefits.

Rankings

One of the most important benefit we see from having internal links is the increased search engine rankings. By placing an internal link, you are essentially passing on “link juice” from one post to another. Link juice is a term that is used to explain how effective a link is to helping search engines rank the page.

The more link juice a page has, the better it is seen in the eyes of Google. You are also implementing back links throughout your whole site, which makes the main domain name rank higher.

Another thing to keep in mind, is to use anchor texts to your advantage. You can use the anchor text as keywords for the page that is being linked, so not only are you providing it link juice, your also increasing the rank through the keyword. Using the proper anchor texts will also help your visitors navigate throughout your site, making them much happier and also willing to stay on the site longer.

Traffic Increase

The whole point of search engine optimization is to rank higher in the search engines to attract more visitors. The more visitors you get, the higher you are ranked.

It is a great cycle that once you get into, makes running a website much easier and profitable. By optimizing your site with the proper amount of internal links, you will see an increase of traffic that will help your website achieve its goals.

There are a few different aspects that go into why internal linking helps increase the traffic other than increased rankings, such as better indexing, lower bounce rates, and happier visitors, but we will cover all that information in the upcoming sections.

Better Indexing

Search engines get all of their information from bots that are typically called spiders. These spiders crawl through websites, usually through internal links, so having more links will help those bots index your pages and new content. A lot of website owners fail to see the importance of optimizing their websites for these spiders.

If a spider isn’t able to crawl through your website to find your pages and content, then those pages won’t be indexed and will never show up on any rankings. It is incredibly important that spiders are able to get to your pages and review the content.

Decreased Bounce Rate

This is another main reason why internal linking is very beneficial for any website. High bounce rates can really hurt rankings and look poorly to search engines. If your website is seeing a lot of people entering the site and quickly leaving it, then you have to ask yourself why that is happening.

Usually this happens because the visitor ran out of things to do, or was unaware that there was more for them to interact with. If you simply leave each page blank without any links to other content, then they will just leave and find content on other websites. It is best to have internal links with anchor words that the reader can easily understand so they know there is more content that they would be interested in.

Internal links increase the overall navigation of you site, making it much more user friendly. The more user friendly your website is, the better chance it has to keep people happy and interested. While a lot of the work you put into the site usually has to do with marketing and SEO, you can never forget that the ultimate way to promote the site, is to have a site that people like.

The more people enjoy being on your site the more you will see increased traffic and better rankings. So while you should definitely keep SEO and marketing in mind, make sure your visitors are happy as well.