They way your pages are interlinked on your website tells Google what pages & content you think are most relevant to each other.
A better, more thoroughly and well thought out internal website linking structure ranks better…
…and opens up more SEO action opportunities that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
When your website in interlinked well, your link building and domain name SEO do more work for a wider range of your pages.
What is the Optimal Internal Website Interlinking Structure?
Basically, you want to make contextual links within the content to any highly relevant pages as much as possible.
A contextual link is a link within the normal text content of the website…
…as you can see above where I linked to my off page SEO link building with the text of “link building.”
For example, if your law firm website has a URL about divorce law that mentions custody agreements and you have another webpage about custody agreements, then you want to link to it.
What this will do is add more relevance, and, therefore, more Google ranking power, to both the page you are linking to AND the page you are linking from!
Furthermore, when you get a link from another website this page, it also gives some power to the page that is getting linked to…
…AND you create a more thorough user experience that keeps visitors engaging with your brand for longer.
SEO benefits of good internal website linking
So, the SEO benefits of excellent interlinking on your website are multiple and they build off each other!
The good news is that this ranking process is pretty simple — just link out to any relevant content within your content at every opportunity you have!
Note: if you haven’t setup the basics of On Page SEO like with your website’s meta tags, H tags, or proper canonical tags, then the power of the interlinking will be significantly diminished!
One thing to be aware of when interlinking is to make sure you keep up to date with your webpage URLs or else you may end up with some of the error HTTP codes like 404 errors. You don’t want a lot of your links to error or else Google will penalize you.
Pro Tip: Be aware that the anchor text you use while interlinking does matter!