Home > Services > Contact > About > Sitemap

Definition of the term, "internal linking"

internal linking

Internal linking is the phrase given to the concept of linking pages of your site together (ie, linking your pages internally). How you structure your internal links can be important for SEO, although today the overall impact on your SEO campaign is minimal.

Internal linking was more of an issue a few years ago where the technique carried a lot of weight (that is, it increased the "score" search engines allocated to pages within your site), resulting in many website owners to link excessively to other pages on their site (to the extent that some people would have dozens of links on any given page, all pointing back to a single page).

This technique (for SEO) is far too excessive for legitimate businesses to adopt - it creates pages that are unfriendly for visitors and as such can have an impact on sales conversions.

Modern day SEO still takes internal linking into account, but rather than forcing hard and fast rules onto the site being optimised, your SEO should simply be providing you with guidelines to help follow best practice techniques.

The key issue facing SEO is that search engine spiders use links to find and index new pages on your site - with this in mind, it is important to have a well planned internal linking structure.

Related terms and definitions

• algorithm
• best industry practice
• ethical link building
• ethical SEO
• external linking

eflaunt is a UK Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation agency based in Edinburgh, Scotland. For industry news, please refer to the eflaunt SEO blog.