We all know that the external links to our websites increase the domain authority which is so important to SEO. However, the internal links also play a part – these pass through what’s often called ‘page authority’, as search engines try to work out the relative importance of each page. So we need to ensure that the pages we’d like to see ranking in the search engine results have clear links to them from other top pages on the site.
But what are the top pages on the site? As we’re talking here about the authority being given to pages by links, one indication of the ‘strength’ of our own pages might be the number of external links to them. And that’s information which we can find in Google Search Console, in the ‘Links’ report. Pay particular attention to the number of linking sites here; I’d suggest that 5 links from 5 different sites is much better than 10 links from 1 site.
Now, an internal link building exercise is unlikely to catapult a page to the top of the results. But suppose we’re working on improving the ranking of one of our pages for a particular search, perhaps because we’ve seen in Google Search Console that it’s ranking around position 11, and needs just one more push to get it on the first page. Now we know what the key pages are on our site, could we find a relevant excuse on these pages to add a link to our target page, using the search term as the anchor text for the link? I’m sure we could. Give it a go, and be sure to monitor the position of the page in search to see if the exercise has any effect.