SEO has perhaps never been more vital to the success of a website than it is today in the digital age. One such basic and oft-overlooked element of on-page optimization is internal linking. Internal links not only help users find their way through your website, but they also keep search engines aware of how they might index your pages. An Internal Link Checker tool, therefore, is a game-changer in optimizing this kind of internal linking strategy. Read on below to learn the benefits of an internal link checker, how it works, and why every website owner or digital marketer should prioritize internal linking as part of their SEO strategy.
Before moving on to how an internal link checker works, let's understand what an internal link is.
Internal links are hyperlinks that point to one page within a website to another page of the same domain. For example, when you write about digital marketing on your blog, you can link to another blog where you discuss about SEO. So, internal links are everything in contrast to the external links that point from a website to an altogether different domain.
Bring users to pertinent content or to central pages.
This allows search engine crawlers to catalog your site correctly.
It helps the structure and content hierarchical design of your site.
This internal linking provides better navigation to different sections of your website for users. It leads them to the most relevant or related content, which will lead to more engagement and a better experience on your website.
Internal linking distributes page authority, known also as link juice, to various parts of your website. The more the internal links that point to a given page, the more important the page is viewed and hence, the better the rankings in search engine results may be.
The crawlers automatically take you through discovering new content and rank you. Through a proper internal linking strategy, you can ensure your website is completely crawled, indexed, and then ranked by search engines.
Internal links can also be used to encourage visitors to click around your website and read more related content, thus reducing your website's bounce rate and increasing the time users spend on your website-both of these are metrics that are important to the improvement of your website's SEO performance.
Internal link checker is one of the software solutions that analyze the inner linking of your website. This tool crawls through your whole website mapping all the internal links between various pages, checks if such links are fit, and ensures that search engines along with users can view the given link correctly.
A typical internal link checker analyses the following.
An internal link checker tool works in quite a similar way to that of the crawling process of search engines. It starts at your website's homepage and traces through every link, mapping it for all intents and purposes. The report usually generated by the tool shows health, status, and efficiency about all your internal links.
Here's a general step-by-step breakdown of how the tool works:
Website Crawl: The tool will basically crawl your website, go on searching for each of the internal links available in your website and eventually create a visual or tabular map of the internal link structure created in your website.
Data Analysis: The tool also analyzes several key metrics that involve broken links, redirect chains, and orphaned pages. Also, relevance of the anchor text used for internal links is analyzed.
Report Generation: Upon finishing the crawl, the tool will generate a report showing areas that should be highlighted, such as broken internal links, inefficient link depth, or underlinked pages.
Optimization Recommendations: Most internal link checkers can give recommendations for improvement in your internal linking structure. For example, they may suggest linking more often to high priority pages and eliminating broken links.
User experience is a vital factor that would work well to the advantage of SEO and also users. If visitors find broken links or dead ends on a website, they tend to leave early and this does increase the bounce rate. Using the help of an internal link checker tool will ensure that your users are not faced with any hassle in navigation.
Broken links can be catastrophic for your SEO and might even infuriate users. The internal link checker tool automatically identifies such nasty links and gives you an opportunity to correct them in time.
Internal link checkers can identify opportunities for optimizing SEO that you are missing. For example, you may discover that pages which are relevantly related to your primary content contain no internal links to them. Therefore, you can correct that and benefit from the optimization of crawlability and ranking potential of your website.
Checking the internal links of a big website is very tiring and easy to make some errors. Internal link checkers automatically do this job, free-time which could be spent on other SEO optimization work.
Internal linking is the best distribution of page authority throughout your website. An internal link checker ensures that the most valuable content gets enough link equity from other pages on your site.
To get the best from this, here are some crucial things to look out for in choosing an internal link checker tool:
To carry out the crawl, the tool should crawl your whole site regardless of its size and complexity without missing any internal links.
Tools that can recognize broken internal links, where among others 404 errors, redirect chains, and dead-end links belong, should be sought.
Anchor text is important for SEO and to people navigating your site. A good tool for checking the inner links would analyze anchor text for keyword optimization and relevance.
Orphan pages are pages that have no internal link from any page. Consequently, search engines cannot easily find such pages. Ensure that the tool you choose can detect orphan pages so you can connect them adequately through the required links.
Some pages of your website could be too "deep" into the site's structure. This is pages you need to click a few times from the homepage to access. Such pages rank less within the search engines, and an internal link checker can highlight such situations as well.
Clear and descriptive anchor text let users know what to expect from a link. It also helps the search engines know what context the web page with the link refers to. In case of internal links, avoid using generic text such as "click here."
Internal linking is more effective when more important content receives more internal links. Try to identify high-value traffic- or conversion-driving pages and link to them regularly in other areas of your site.
Broken internal links are bad for SEO and for users. The use of an internal link checker will help you identify broken links and repair them before they are a problem.
Have as much of the pages as possible accessible within three clicks from the home page. Pages that are too deep will not be crawled as frequently, which will decrease their rankings.
For all the content published for the first time, make sure you add some internal links from other relevant pages. It not only helps the search engines find the new content but it also makes the visitor happy.
An internal link checker tool is absolutely essential to any serious webmaster trying to optimize the inner linking of your site. It is one of the essential tools to review the health of your internal links, allowing you to raise the game for SEOs and for optimizing user experience so that all of your content can be searched out by both search engines and users alike.
It is possible to do this by employing an internal link checker quite frequently, and you shall thus keep your structure of the website well-organized and improve rankings such that, in consequence, you drive more organic traffic to your site. So, if you still haven't used a link checker tool internally, start doing so now!
This article can be further adapted based on the special features and unique aspects of your internal link checker tool, real use cases, and examples to explain further.
In order to count the internal links present in the website content, one can either go through the content manually or use Internal Link Checker. You may also access the following tools that demonstrate site crawling features, helpful in mapping the internal links and in locating the orphan and broken links as well as the issues concerning the optimization of anchor texts. The provided tools consist of Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and SEMrush.
Internal linking enhances user experience on the site, helps in spreading link equity (‘page authority’), aids in improving rank in search engine results, and cuts down on bounce rates. It also contributes to better crawling and indexing of your site by search engines to make it possible for important pages to be located quickly and ranked highly in the search results.
There is no strict limit on the number of internal links per page; however some moderation should apply. Use it in a way that wouldn't overwhelm the page. It should be useful for the users; otherwise, it becomes too much. According to Google, generally, internal linking should not exceed 100 per page, but it depends upon how long and complicated the contents are.
On most pages, internal links can be around 3-10 depending on the length of the content. Internal linking makes sense where it helps users by providing navigation to relevant pages. After all, it is advisable to limit oneself to pages that are of greater importance to conversions and other users.
The increase of Internal Links can be achieved by:
Updating the content quite frequently and incorporating links within the fresh content.
Building a pillar content that links out to other written articles.
Employing bam tools like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog and identifying pages that have too few hyperlinks.A content strategy that links to other associated post or pages.
When there is an excessive amount of internal linking on a page, such links become irritating to the search engines and water down the value that every link possesses. Also, too many links on a page interfere with user experience as they create a cluttered look on the pages. Therefore, internal linking should be proportionate and should be oriented on relation and purpose of the contents.
Internal linking opportunities can be found using:
Using a content audit tool to find underlinked or orphan pages.
Analyze your most popular or high-converting pages and add links to similar content.
Identify pages that target similar keywords and interlink these using keyword research.
Ensure that the relevant contents are linked by reviewing content clusters.
There are two specific types of internal links.
Navigational Links: These are positioned in menus, sidebars or footers and tend to help in navigating the main categories of the website drawers.
Contextual Links: The links that are provided within the content and they link a user to a relevant page or important pages. For SEO purposes, understanding and bringing context to these links is more useful for humans and search engines.
These FAQs will help answer some of the common questions about internal links and their contributing factors to SEO.