How to use internal linking for SEO

MARTIN SPLITT: Here on the left, you see what that looks like.
Each link has meaningful words as anchor text.
And you can easily spot what the link will take you to.
On the right, you see a page that
doesn't use meaningful anchor text,
and that isn't a good user experience, especially when
you try to quickly scan the page and find the right link to use.
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Today, I would like to talk to you about links.
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I know.
This topic is one of the most popular and evergreen topics
in SEO.
I would like to focus on internal links today.
A lot of this episode also applies to external links,
though.
Let's look at this website.
You landed here looking for tips on food
for your newly arrived kitten.
You saw the guide for taking care of kittens
and read through it.
But do you know where to go next when
you're looking for information on food for kittens?
Let's try this version of the page instead.
Anywhere that you'd want to check out here?
You'll probably notice the links in the navigation and the links
in the article, and maybe you saw links elsewhere on the page.
And that's what internal links are for and why they matter.
They help your users identify the next steps to take,
and they connect individual pages on your site
to each other.
Now, should you link to everything
everywhere like this page does?
No, of course not.
Overdoing it doesn't make it better,
and I would like to ask you to apply
some critical judgment here.
So what are the next logical steps?
How does my content relate to other content
I've got, the link to these things, where it makes sense
without overdoing it?
All right.
So we've talked about how users use
links to navigate your website, but how does
this relate to Google Search?
Well, Googlebot uses links, as well.
Googlebot uses internal links primarily for two things--
discovering pages on your site and understanding the relation
of pages on your site.
Googlebot always tries to discover as many of your pages
as possible, so whenever it finds a URL in your pages,
Googlebot might try crawling it, as well.
But there are a few things you can
do to make it clear to your users and Googlebot
that something is a link.
HTML has an element dedicated for links, the A element.
For an A element to be a proper link,
it should have a URL in its href attribute.
This can either be a relative or absolute URL.
Either way is fine.
Some developers, however, try to do clever things
with other elements, like spans, divs, or button elements.
But fundamentally, if it is behaving like a link,
it should better be a link.
So here is a summary of what is a good practice for links
in your HTML and what is not.
Besides these technicalities, users and bots alike
prefer meaningful anchor text.
Here on the left, you see what that looks like.
Each link has meaningful words as anchor text,
and you can easily spot what the link will take you to.
On the right, you see a page that doesn't
use meaningful anchor text.
And that isn't a good user experience, especially when
you try to quickly scan the page and find the right link to use.
All right.
Let's summarize what we've talked about today.
So links are important for users and bots
to find related content on a page.
Use the appropriate HTML to make links,
and give them meaningful anchor text
to help users quickly find the right link for where
they want to go.
Also, links help users and bots to understand your content
structure, so use them reasonably-- not too little,
not too many.
Leave us a comment if you want more technical content on Google
Search Central and what topics we should cover in the future.
Thanks for watching this video, and see you soon.
All right.
Enough SEO.
Time to go swimming.
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Woo.