An internal link connects one page of a website to another on the same website. Internal links provide clear paths for spiders, prolonged sessions for users, and a tight-knit network of pages and posts. According to Google Search Advocate John Mueller, internal linking is “supercritical for SEO.” He says they are one of the most relevant things that help Googlebot and users to recognize the importance of pages within a website.
Strategic internal linking is an SEO power technique, especially for content marketing. There are different types of internal links such as navigator, footer, and contextual links. Navigator links appear on the header menu with proper HTML formatting and footer links or boilerplate links appear on every page of a website. At the same time, contextual links help to get better internal links pointing to related articles and topics. SEO link building services help to improve website navigation and understand the architecture and hierarchy of a website, reduce the bounce rate, and increase page views.
Some of the common issues with internal links include broken internal links that are not ideal for communicating with authority, links that cannot be crawled when the format of the URL is incorrect, orphaned sitemap pages that cannot be accessed or indexed. Pages with single internal links can miss opportunities in SEO and permanent redirects might reduce the crawl budget.
The maximum number of links for your websites or pages on your websites that bring back your content should be around 20. Like any other factor that determines the performance of a site, the number of internal links can also decrease or increase, according to the size of the website.
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