While there are hundreds of thousands of posts on maximizing external links for your blog, like a red headed step child no one pays much attention to internal links. Internal links can be very powerful in helping you distribute the link equity that those external links bring, and they can decrease your bounce rate and increase your page views per visitor by sending your visitors to other pages.

Internal linking or Interlinking is the way that all of the pages of your site link to each other and the way that new pages that you create link to existing pages and get links from existing pages in order to give these new pages some link juice. Internal linking is valuable both from the user perspective (users must be able to easily navigate to all of the pages of your site) as well as for search engines (in order for Google to fully crawl your site it must be able to find each page, adding links within your site will help accomplish this). Internal linking makes it easier for Google spider to crawl through a page and list it in the index. So, it becomes clear that internal links in a website performs three functions simultaneously.

The biggest advantage of internal linking is that it is under your control and you can use it the way you want. They tell the search engines how the content of each page in your website is relevant to the site. Here are a few of the common internal links found in a website. You can also find how each of them is relevant to the website.

Internal text links: Text, as you know, is mightier than images when it comes to SEO. Image links, Javascript links, image map links – none of these are as effective as text links.

Category/subcategory links: Any website would have categories and sub categories, though the hierarchy might change depending on the kind of website. It shows the search engines how you want to group your content.

Related groups links: This is important in the case of ecommerce or news websites that have advantage in showing the related products or related stories links. It increases the usability as well as topical relevance of the page.

Single item links: Single items in a website have their own importance. However, in the eyes of the search engines they gain their importance not when they are given randomly here and there but when they are given under a proper category, title, etc.

Sitemap links: The importance of sitemaps is almost a globally agreed point and is worthy of an altogether different post. For search engines as well as users, sitemap link is equally important.

Having a good internal linking structure is an extremely valuable aspect of SEO, and if you have not done so yet, we will advise you to examine the internal linking structure of your site.