All of those who own or run a website are sure to be aware of the importance of internal linking. As we all know, internal linking in a website improves navigation within the website for all the visitors. However, there is much more to this. A cohesively integrated website, with effective internally linked architecture also improves the search engine ranking of the entire website. The internal linking ensures that a particular website is properly spidered and all linked pages of the site are found by the search engines.

However, before we proceed, let us also understand what internal linking exactly means. In a layman’s terms, the internal link is a hyperlink that connects a page in the website to another page or document in the same website. So, with effective internal linking, you can boost the page rankings of your website (including the internal links to the internal pages). This will ascertain that the site gains a lot of popularity, which will automatically translate into business flow for the company.

Now, there are also some aspects that you need to consider while carrying out the internal linking of the site. Firstly, you should always have a text link instead of a graphic link. To aid this, you should also make your anchor tag keyword rich. Secondly, it is also important to have a sitemap for all the links in your website. Essentially, a sitemap is a page that contains all the internal links in your site. This helps the search engine in crawling the entire web site easily. Keeping these attributes in mind, you will be able to have effective internal linking to your website.

Also, depending upon your specific requirements, you would have to choose from the three different internal linking patterns which are Hierarchal, Looping and Extensive internal linking. As per the objectives you want to achieve for Pagerank optimisation, user navigation ease as well as site theme, you can select any of these.