Many people know that Google and other search engines look at the number of quality links going to a site as one part of determining that site's rank for a particular search phrase. Another part of what search engines look at, which some may not be familiar with, is internal linking.
Internal linking is simply linking to content on your site from other pages on your same site. For example, on this site's home page, we have links to our blog articles and various services. Those are internal links, just as are the ones you just read. Even your site's navigation (both primary and secondary) is internal linking. If you break it down though, you can categorize your internal linking into 2 areas: navigation and content links.
SEO is really about building relevancy. More specifically, it's about building relevancy of a particular page to a search phrase. So when you link from one page to another in your site, you're helping yourself out by building relevancy. The key, however, is to make sure you're using the right words. It's one of the reasons why using "click here" for your links isn't such a good idea; unless of course you're actually wanting to rank well for the term "click here".
Let's say you have a website for your physical therapy business and you're linking to the services page from an about page. Here's what some might have for the link:
Click here to learn about our services.
What you're doing there is relating the term "click here" with the content on the services page. This is a better option:
Learn more about our physical therapy services.
See the difference? With the second option you're relating the phrase "physical therapy services" with the services page. And as an added bonus, you're helping with usability. And as another bonus, linking within your content will help search engines go through your site's various pages (i.e., spidering). Word to the wise though: don't overdo it.
Navigation links have a pretty tough but straightforward job: to point users (and search engines) to the main sections and possibly sub-sections of your site in a way that keeps it clear, intuitive and straightforward. For search engines, your navigation needs to be just inclusive enough without being over the top. Linking to every single page or to every single subsection in your navigation makes your navigation overburdened.
What that means for your site then is that you may just not be giving Google and friends the info they need to figure out which pages on your site are most important. Remember what I mentioned about relevancy? Your navigation does this too. Adding too many links in your navigation waters this down. And it makes things confusing for your users. Some have attempted to solve this using drop-down menus but it doesn't make things better. But that's a topic for another day.
As you can tell, link building isn't just about outside, 3rd party websites linking to your site (though that's arguably more important). Internal link building can help with search engines as well. This is especially true for larger sites. So go on with your bad self and start linking to your own content.
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