What are internal links?

The term internal linking, literally translated from the English internal linking, identifies all those hyperlinks that present on any web page included in the website domain, point to another internal destination of the same domain. So internal links, connect through a url two pages or other resources present in the same website.

What does an internal link look like?

Un esempio di codice html per creare un link interno è anchor text, dove Il tag HTML definisce un’ancora, l’attributo href specifica l’URL della pagina a cui è diretto il collegamento dalla pagina di origine, e prima del tag di chiusura c’è il testo ancora che anticipa il contenuto della pagina di destinazione. Dunque l’attributo href diventa collegamento ipertestuale esclusivamente per la presenza del tag di apertura e chiusura .

Tale sintassi è ovviamente uguale a quella dei link esterni, ovvero i collegamenti che partendo da un dominio, puntano a un documento web di un’altro dominio.

Link interni: a cosa servono?

The functions of internal links are different, they have a navigational purpose for the user, but also SEO for search engine ranking purposes. Therefore, internal linking represents a crucial factor for On-site SEO optimization

Examples of navigational internal links are the links in the navigation menu present in all pages of the domain, which allow the user to navigate following the hierarchy of pages and categorizations to view the target page. Through the proper use of internal links therefore, it is possible to create a hierarchy of information on the site.

An example of internal links used for optimization purposes , is given by the silo SEO strategy. In fact, internal links are critically important in linking pages between physical categorization siloes, but also in creating virtual categorizations.

Other functions of internal links in order to achieve better Google rankings include:

• To facilitate the search engine’s crawling of all pages on the site.
• To prevent the existence of orphan pages
• To properly distribute authority across all web pages
• Of lowering the bounce rate of users.

Anchor text
In the section on the syntax of an internal link, we saw that it also consists of a clickable text part. Such clickable text, allows the user to move from the source page to go to the target internal page.

Unlike what Google recommends for inbound links, so-called backlinks, regarding the anchor text of internal links the search engine also advises to be concise by including the keyword most representative of the destination page.

Although Google does not place a ban on using anchor text in exact match, I always recommend not to overdo it and vary the anchor text to the same page.

The anchor text must be precise, also to facilitate the search engine’s task of being able to quickly index a url, within a database made up of keywords.

The anchor text of an internal link, has a direct influence on semantic relevance. In fact, one of the tips I always offer is to place the internal link in a part of the content that has a semantically related context to the target page.

Types of internal links
Making this definition our own, it is easy to see what internal links are:

• of the navigation menu
• of navigation filters
• of breadcrumbs
• of images
• and any other clickable element in the page content that leads to another web page on the same website.

A good number of internal links to the site’s pivotal topics will be useful for visitors and also for letting Google know what weight you want to give to a specific topic.

In this way, better link juice is realized: the more semantically relevant the internal links are, the more the search engine judges their distribution as functional in answering queries.

The benefit to users is that they easily enjoy content that is well reachable, comprehensive, and authoritative (improves user experience). For robots, a good organization of internal links is of great help in being able to scan and categorize website content and pages.

The expected result is again to improve engine rankings, so care must be taken in this regard to avoid some mistakes.

In the same way that google considers a site with a high bounce rate to be of low quality, an internal link that erroneously leads to irrelevant areas or nonexistent pages is penalizing.

In order to build a functional and effectively effective internal link system, one must also avoid links blocked by the robots.txt or nofollow archive, as well as linking subpages together, and it is useful to minimize outbound links, especially if they point to documents such as a PDF.