When it comes to Page Rank and SERP ranking, both the inbound links from other websites that are important and the internal linking structure inside a website are equally important. SEO experts are unanimous about the fact that internal links can be useful weapons in your SEO campaign. The upside of optimizing your website with internal links is you have complete control over it. Hence, while embarking on the link building campaign it is wise to start with the ones that are right there on your site.

Benefits of internal links

Getting your website spidered

The proper linking structure of organized internal links ensures that your website is easily crawlable and all pages are found by search engine spiders. Getting every pages of your website spidered is the simplest method that you can follow for rankings. It also helps the search engines index more pages of your website. It also helps to increase the number of key phrases that your website can be ranked for.

Basically, a functional navigation structure is essential for the users to find the pages with minimum possible clicks. Though image based navigation structure are good from visitors? point of view, they are not that effective when search engines are considered.

Building the relevancy of a page

Generally, the homepage of the websites are targeted with the most important pages and the internal pages are optimized with less important keywords. To build the relevancy of the internal pages with the keywords you can optimize the anchor text of the links with the keywords. However, the linking to internal pages should not be restricted at home page, navigation, footers, or inline text links also add value in SEO arena.

Increasing the Page Rank of the Inner Pages

According to search engine rules, the closer is a page from the home page the higher the value of the page. But that doesn't mean that all the pages of your website should be linked from home page, but the navigation structure should allow the visitors to navigate with minimum number of clicks.

As any inbound links, the internal links also help to build the page rank of the internal pages.

There are some important points that should be discussed as it is critical while building internal links on your website.

Internal links and anchor text

The anchor text of internal link has very little impact on the home page. In case of linking to some other website, placing the name of the website as anchor text has positive nudge over using a generic keyword. But when it comes to internal linking optimizing the anchor text with the more relevant keyword has doesn't have any positive impact on ranking.

Manipulation with anchor text of internal links

It has been observed that excessive internal anchor text linking can trigger automated penalty on Google. Some webmaster or SEO services may find it another technique of using keywords. But Google considers it to be keyword stuffing or over optimization of anchor text.

Adding more internal links to a page doesn't necessarily valuable

Adding internal links to a page beyond certain point doesn't mean it would allow flow of link juice.

Use your internal links naturally to build a functional website as well as increase the page rank of the inner pages. But remember that manipulating with internal links may result in penalty from search engines. Hence, it is important that your SEO services should be well-versed with these facts.