Fact Checked by: Dr. Marie Haynes
Internal linking is a highly actionable onsite optimization strategy that helps both users and search bots find and understand your site’s content.
In the following guide, we are going to teach you exactly what internal linking is, what its purpose is for Wix SEO, and some best practises for internal linking. We are then going to give you a step-by-step guide on how to optimize internal links on your Wix site.
What is internal linking?
Links, or “hyperlinks”, are key to how we navigate the internet. They allow users and search crawlers to navigate from one webpage to another without needing to type a new url into the address bar.
For search crawlers, following links is the only way they discover and then index pages on the web. If a page isn’t linked to from anywhere, externally or internally, it is not going to get found by Google.
Internal links are the links that move you to another url on the current root directory i.e. a different page of the same website. In contrast, an external link takes you off the site to another domain.
From an SEO point of view, Internal linking is comprised of:
Choosing where to place internal links on your site
Determining what to part of your site to link to link each other
Selecting the most appropriate anchor text to use for these links
The main purposes of internal links are:
To help both users and search bots navigate your site
Create a clearer structure for your website that helps define how your content is linked together (i.e. a site hierarchy) and what your most important content is
Allow PageRank to flow through your site
Internal links on Main vs Supplemental Content
Internal links can be split into two categories: Links from the supplemental content of your site and links from the main content of your site.
A page's main content is what the user is going to the most interested in. This is likely the unique post, article or guide, or perhaps the images or the video on your page.
Conversely, the supplemental content is everything else, such as the main navigation, the site’s footer, and widgets or features like ‘related articles’ and ‘recent posts’. This is often what is referred to as ‘boilerplate’ content.
Both the main and the supplemental content of a site contain internal links and it is important to optimize both to help improve the user experience and your search engine rankings.
Best Practices for Internal Linking
Using internal links to create a clear site structure/url hierarchy
Internal linking helps both users and Googlebot (well, all search crawlers) to be able to find your content.
Think about this from the user side where you are, say, trying to find news about the US & Canada from the BBC. The URL for this section of the BBC site is bbc.com/news/world/us_and_canada - not something you are likely to know off of the top of your head!
But you may already know how to get to the BBC’s website -- bbc.co.uk. When you arrive there, the main navigation will lead you to where you want to go. First you click on “News” link and then you click on “US & Canada” link, and presto!, you’ve found what you’re looking for!
For a search bots, there is no chance their crawler will find a page unless it has been linked to from somewhere else on the web that they can find.
To help bots find all of your content, it is best to adopt a url structure whereby a crawler can follow the internal links and it will be able to find all the pages you want it to discover and index.
The ideal site structure for this should be formed like a pyramid, with your most important content at the top and the most niche content at the bottom. It looks something like this:
Commonly known as a “hub and spoke” model, if you trace your finger along the lines from any one page, you can find any other page on the site. When optimally structured, the further away (or more links you need to follow) one page is from another, the less relevant that page is from the original page.
Moreover, the closer to the top of the pyramid we get, the more important that content should be. In most cases, you should be linking top down in the following fashion:
Homepage -> Sections/Categories -> individual posts and pages
Note: This should not just be reflected in your internal linking structure, but also in your url structure.
For example, if you are linking homepage -> category 1 -> post 1 as your internal linking strategy, your url structure should follow as yourdomain.com/category1/post1
Internal Linking from Main Content
You want to internally link to the most important parts of your Wix site following the site structure we discussed above. You can do this whether you are starting a Wix site from scratch or optimizing your current site.
Once you have identified the most important sections of your Wix site -- your hubs or what might call your ‘cornerstone’ content -- you want to start internally linking out from the main content of these pages to relevant ‘spoke’ pages, which in turn you link back to the cornerstone/hub from the spokes.
This helps to indicate to Google the importance of the hub pages within your Wix site’s hierarchy since the hub pages will be getting considerably more internal links, which means more link equity will be flowing to these parts of your site. In the same vein, you want to internally link from your homepage to your main hub pages, so that all PageRank flows optimally through your hub and spoke structure.
For internal linking, you will want to do some keyword research for each page you are linking to and use those keywords as anchor text for internal links. You are encouraged to use descriptive anchor text with search engines in mind when it comes to your internal links.
Internal Linking from Supplemental Content
Main Navigation
Almost all of your sites supplemental content is going to contain internal links. The most obvious of this is your sites navigation links. We have found that the best strategy for optimizing your main navigation links is to be consistent with the site structure.
Following from the pyramid example above, there should be a way to easily get to the top of the pyramid (homepage) from each page on the site. The next level of links should be to your hubs or cornerstone content. From there, you can provide sub-category links to each piece of spoke content if relevant. He is an example:
Source: wdwprepschool.com
This kind of structure helps to show Google and users what the priority level is for your content.
Other Supplemental content
When it comes to linking from other supplemental content, such as related posts, it is important to link back to cornerstone content.
HTML formatting an internal link?
A lot of CMSs and site builders (including Wix) will make it really easy for you to internally link from your main content. However, if you choose to write your site from scratch or you wish to check that the internal link is properly formatted, here is how it should be formatted.
This an internal link from Marie Haynes Consulting’s post on E-A-T. The post references a major unannounced algorithm update. Since MHC have a page on the site that details every Google algorithm update (announced and unannounced), this is a great opportunity to internally link to that resource.
On the page it looks like this, using the anchor “major unnamed algorithm update”:
In the source code, this is formatted like this:
Let’s take a closer look at how that is link breaks down in the html:
The link starts with “<a” tag, which opens the link. It is followed by the location of the url you are linking to “href=”www.yourdomain.com/” and then the anchor text “>anchor text<”, and finally a “a>” tag which closes the link.
Common Problems with Internal Linking
Here are some potential internal linking pitfalls you should be sure to avoid:
Ensure your internal links are set to ‘followed’! This is a must. There are some exceptions, though, and you may want to no-follow links from user-generated content such as comment sections or forums, or links to login pages.
Keyword stuffing: It is wise to use descriptive anchor text for internal links, but don’t go crazy trying to stuff every link full of a variety of keywords that you hope the page might rank for. Focus on the important keywords and linking this anchor text to high-quality, relevant pieces of content.
Don’t hide your main navigation: Ensure this is easy to find for search engines and users.
Don’t hide links in submission-required forms and also avoid links only accessible through internal search boxes.
When it comes to links in javascript, Google needs to see the a href element in order to crawl and analyze the link and anchor text, so be careful and test thoroughly if you are using onclick functions for your internal links. <span onclick=”Page(‘link’)”>Link</span> would not be crawled, but <a href=”/link” onclick=”Page(‘link’)”>Link</a> would be.
Spamming links on pages: There used to be a 150-links-per-page rule that SEOs believed in. Although we don’t believe there is a hard limit on this anymore, if a link is not likely to be clicked on by a user or the page is not user friendly, don’t simply stuff a bunch of links with anchor text onto a page in hopes of improving your rankings.
How to Set up Internal Links in Wix
Unfortunately, Wix does not currently have an add-on available to automate internal linking across your site for specific anchors. This currently has to be performed manually by inserting links on a post-by-post and page-by-page basis.
If you’ve already built out your Wix site, and weren’t internally linking with important keyword anchors to relevant pages on your site all along, you now need to go back and insert internal links. We recommend the following.
Perform a site:search for your site in Google along with the anchor text you would like to add internal links for:
For each page you find with an instance of the keyword, open up the page or post editor, find the anchor text in question, and add a link in manually. Ensure the link is set to followed.
Callum Scott
Callum Scott moved to Ottawa from Scotland in 2017 where he read an MA in International Relations and Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. While writing his thesis on digital activism, Callum developed a fascination with how the digital experience is shaped through our communications and interactions with different networks and services. He is particularly interested in the rapid advancements in voice search, machine learning and ‘entity-understanding’, and is passionate about helping businesses understand how they can take advantage of these emerging markets.