1. Search engines need to know what your site is all about and they use internal links to crawl your site, understand what you think is most important and build up a picture.
2. Sites rich in internal links tend to do better for search visibility.
3. You can project to search engines and users what you’re all about by using the Content Clusters internal linking strategy.
4. Pages with lots of internal links will be rated as more important and will go up the search rankings.
5. Link-rich pages can also improve time on site, especially if highly relevant links are put high up the page.

Sites with denser networks of internal links appear to do better than those without. It’s a bit like gravity, with greater density exerting a greater magnetic pull on search engines. But a better analogy might be facial recognition – a basic site with few internal links only provides an outline structure to search engine crawlers. Adding lots of internal links is like adding contours to the face creating a much sharper image.

What types of internal links are there? And which are most important?

1. Boilerplate: These are links that appear on every page and no editorial decisions have been made over their selection. The most common are top navigation links and footers.  These are important in communicating to users and search engines the structure of your site. One trap organisations should avoid is making the main navigation all about the organisation rather than how it can help.
2. Main content links: These appear within the body of posts and pages and are actively chosen for contextual relevance. They are given the highest weighting by search engines, according to specialist search provider Moz. Such links are fully under the control of content producers and, used correctly, are a powerful way of controlling how search engines rank your pages.
3. Internal Link modules: These are used to group potentially interesting links in a device like a box of related posts. They are a good way to establish content clusters. Here’s an example of how they can be used to highlight highly relevant content elsewhere on your site:

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What’s the Evidence that Internal Linking Works?

There’s a broad consensus among SEO professionals that internal linking is beneficial.

• OnCrawl finds that pages with more links to them get crawled more often by Google and that internal linking works by reducing the distance of any page from the homepage.
• Econsultancy ran a study on the performance of British newspaper sites during the 2014 World Cup and uncovered how the Daily Mail, a titan among online sites, failed to score during the tournament due to a faulty internal linking strategy.
• AuthorityHacker has run tests on a huge database and discovered that the highest ranking pages tend to have lots of internal links, use keyword-rich anchor text, link extensively externally, and are linked to by site pages with lots of backlinks. 

How can I analyse My Internal Linking State of Play?

Google Search Console

Google Search Console has a simple tool to review your internal links. But how should you analyse this?

Boilerplate links: You would expect your homepage to have the most internal links. Every other page is linked to it via navigation. That should be similar for the other links in your top navigation (footer links replicating the top navigation will be ignored by search engines). The heavy lifting here is being done by your CMS – this is the top-level structure of your site.

Article-level links: This is where the big gains are and the area most organisations spend too little time on. The effort of creating new content is hard enough without someone having to spend yet more time on working out which pages really ought to be linked to, and which ones ought to link to it. That’s something that requires some kind of protocol, which rarely exists.

What are the Most Successful Internal Linking Practices?

1. Web etiquette: Link whenever it is helpful to the reader.
2. Self-explanation: Use anchor text that makes it crystal-clear what a reader will get if they click on the link (so avoid ‘click here’ or ‘read more’). 
3. No duplication: Make sure each link is unique – search engines will be confused if you use the same anchor text to point to different pages.
4. Use early opportunities: Links higher up the page are regarded as most valuable. They also help to increase time spent on the site.
5. Avoid ‘no-follow’ links because that’s telling search engines this link isn’t important
6. Use your homepage’s power to boost new posts: Your homepage will almost certainly be the highest rated on Google and any pages it points to will gain visibility in the eyes of users and search engines.
7. Do the same for key section pages (and your most popular pages).
8. Reverse linking: In the same way that new content should be linked to old content, link back from old content to your new post. One simple way of doing this is to perform the following Google Search: site: [your website] “[keyphrase for new page”].
9. Don’t overdo it: A working assumption among many SEO professionals is that 10-20 internal links per page is enough.