How Internal Linking Enhances User Experience and SEO 

Have you ever noticed how you keep clicking on internal links when visiting sites like Wikipedia and Healthline, moving from one page to another? 

These sites have mastered the art of internal links and use them to keep visitors on the website for as long as possible. You can use the same strategy either manually or with AI interlinking tools like Linkboss. 

Let’s learn how you can use internal linking to enhance user experience and improve the SEO potential.  

How Internal Links Enhance User Experience 

Internal links play an important role in giving the best user experience. Here, we’ll discuss how: 

Better Navigation 

Internal links help visitors find related and helpful content easily. For example, a blog post on gardening could include links to articles on gardening techniques, plant care, or seasonal tips. That would help the reader explore topics that they are interested in. It would keep them on your site longer, increasing monetary potential through ads. 

Internal links are also extremely important for e-commerce sites like Amazon, as they help visitors find new products and categories through internal links. 

Increasing Contextual Relevance 

Internal links provide additional context and information about the topic, which helps visitors understand the content better. For example, an article on climate change would include links to the causes of climate change and its potential impact on Earth. These links allow the readers to get a comprehensive idea about the topic through the internal links. 

Helps in Content Discovery 

Internal links allow visitors to find content they might not have discovered otherwise. For example, a recipe site that sells kitchen appliances can link to relevant products within their recipe posts (a bread machine for a specific bread recipe). Or they can link to the recipe articles on their product reviews, which can increase page views and ad revenue. 

How Internal Links Improve SEO 

Internal links are one of the critical pillars of SEO, without which no SEO strategy can ever succeed. Learn why internal links are so crucial to SEO: 

Improves Crawl Rate 

Internal links act as a map for search engines. The better the internal linking system, the easier it is for the search engine to understand your site structure. 

This makes it possible for the crawlers to crawl a significant portion of your content regularly.  

Also, it’s very important to have a well-structured interlinking system that prevents crawlers from getting stuck on dead-end pages. That way, the crawlers will be able to access all the contents. When search engines can easily crawl your site, they will index your pages faster. 

Distributing Link Equity Properly 

By strategically passing link equity between high-authority pages and others, you can do wonders for your site and increase organic visitors significantly. Link equity is a metric that indicates the page’s authority in search engines’ eyes. Internal links will be vital to distribute link equity properly. 

There are two strategies. First, you can link to low-performing pages from authoritative pages to boost their performance. It helps them rank higher on Google and get you new organic visitors.  

That strategy works great for orphan pages. You can find all the orphan pages on your site with one click using Linkboss.  

Then, you can send them links from authoritative pages. The same method has helped me increase my organic traffic significantly. 

Internal links from authoritative pages also help to index new pages.  

Another strategy is to build links to high-value pages to indicate to Google that they are the most essential pages of your website. That helps the important pages rank higher on SERP.  

Establishing Site Hierarchy 

Internal links are the tools that will help you find a solid foundation for your site on which you can establish your site’s hierarchy.  

The hierarchy makes it easy for search engines to understand the relationship between your content and signal which pages are the most important. As a result, the most important pages get an SEO boost and enjoy a high potential of ranking higher in the SERP. 

Increasing Keyword Relevance 

Internal links can help google understand the context and relevance through specific keywords.  

For example, the anchor texts linking to a particular page can have significant SEO impacts. So, whenever you use anchor texts, use relevant keywords. But make sure they look natural and don’t disrupt the user experience. 

Conclusion 

Anyone who cares about user experience and SEO – every web admin should – must focus on their interlinking strategy.  

And remember, the strategy has to keep evolving according to the content of your website. Keeping track of hundreds of internal links and anchor texts can seem like a huge hassle, and it is a huge hassle. That’s why we use an automation tool like Linkboss, which helps us easily track all the interlinks. 

Irrespective of whether you do it manually or with a tool, make sure you have a solid internal linking plan. That will make the visitor’s experience smooth and skyrocket your rankings on SERP.