As an SEO Consultant, internal links are one of my most effective secret weapons of SEO Services.
Why are Internal Links so important for SEO?
Google uses internal links as a signal to determine the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl. When implemented strategically, internal links pass authority to money pages from one page to another.
Here is a good read about best practices for internal linking from Google.
5 Killer Internal Linking Best Practices
SEO Experts may say internal linking isn't as strong as backlinks. But, trust me when used strategically, internal linking works wonders. One of my recent case study, I utilized the internal linking strategy to rank one of my client site from page #7 to page #2 within 2 weeks.
Use element <a></a> for links
Search engines like Google <a></a> read element of html with an href attribute. Most links marked otherwise aren't read by SEO bots. So make sure you link web pages using element.
Use relevant keyword focused anchor text
Anchor text also known as link text is the visible text of the link.
Use naturally occurring and defining text in anchor text. For example if you are passing internal to to blog text about Search Intent, you can have anchor text as search intent.
Use internal links for indexing
It is important that your important pages or posts are indexed by Google.
But if you have thousands of pages, Google won’t index all pages. It is due to the crawl budget.
So how do you make sure your main pages are indexed? You can use internal links to these pages, which helps search engines to locate and index these pages.
Linking between pages/posts
Linking between pages and posts passes authority and relevance.
Rule of thumb is if you want to rank your Page A higher, you will pass links from other pages to Page A.
Put internal links at the top
This is one of the killer SEO tips that most SEO Experts won’t share.
Having internal links earliest in the post or pages for sure have better click through rate and this passes the significant signal to search engines. Whether it is part of the ranking factor or not, it shows intent of significance.