Internal Linking

Hyperlinks that point back and forth within the same website are known as Internal Links. Internal Linking can take you to a different portion of the same page or to a different web page on the same domain.

Good Internal Linking affects search engine ranking (Page Rank). If you have plenty of good, well thought out Internal Linking within your site, this helps make your site's information architecture SEO-friendly. Search engines will be able to easily crawl and navigate your site, taking Internal Links back and forth on your site to find the kind of information that people are searching for.

Remember, Internal Links do not "count" as highly in Page Rank as Inbound links coming from other sites. (And outbound or external Links do not "count" at all in Page Rank.) But do not overlook the importance of Internal Links in your website. On top of making your site SEO-friendly and more accessible to bots, Internal Linking will also make your website easier for users—real people—to navigate. Website visitors are more likely to stay on your site longer if you have good Internal Linking, because they can find the information they need, and then go on to find links to more information that's related to their topic of interest. Internal Links help people keep surfing on your site.

Internal Links are a type of Hyperlink, which are highlighted words or images on a web page that you click on to be redirected to another webpage or another section of the page you're currently viewing. Hyperlinks can be images or text. When Hyperlinks are made from text they're usually highlighted in a different color and underlined. You can tell when you scroll over a Hyperlink because the cursor changes into a hand.

Hyperlinks make it quick and easy to cross-reference text, access suggested websites, send emails through a email composing program (such as Netscape Messenger or Outlook Express), find information, and navigate the world wide web. With Hyperlinks, you don't have to find the desired URL and then type in the URL into the navigation bar.
The use of Internal Hyperlinks is used to create Hypertext—text with links and cross-references to other text—which is now a defining feature of the Internet.

Internal Links can be used to direct website visitors to other pages of the website (assisting navigation), including directing visitors to a specific portion of the page. This is accomplished by using 2 HTML tag anchors to create the Internal link, one of which is placed within the body of the text on the HTML document. By inserting the Internal link this way, it makes it quicker for a web visitor to find what they're looking for. Instead of directing them to the top of a page where they then need to scan the text and scroll down the page to find what they're looking for, an Internal Link that's anchored in the HTML document will take website visitors to an exact spot on the page.