If you have been involved in SEO link building, you know how time consuming it can be to find related sites that are willing to provide a link back to your website. But, one often overlooked opportunity for link building is right within your own site.

Internal link building can help provide clues to search engines as to which pages of your site are most important and which deserve more attention.Just like inbound links count as a vote for content, internal links work much the same way. Pages within your website that have higher internal links pointing to them are typically more important to your site’shierarchy of contentand the search engines will reward those pages over time.

A benefit of using an internal linking strategy is you can control the anchor text for your internal links. There are a few ways to implement internal links but it is best that it the tactic is well thought out and structured, as consistency will produce the best results.

Internal linking can be something as simple as linking body copy text to other pages when referenced within your site’s content or the introduction of related content links that promotes other articles or content on a similar topic. Providing links to more related information is also a great way to increase visitor engagement metrics – getting your site visitors to click into other pages on your website to increase site page views or stay longer on your website to improve time spent on site.

A more technical approach for building internal links is to incorporate breadcrumbs or footer links within your website. The advantage to using one of these tactics is users gain a secondary navigational aid, the linking becomes almost automatic as new pages are associated to sections within your website and search engines like Google are now indexing breadcrumbs and presenting to searchers within the search engine results pages (SERPs).