Internal linking is a powerful SEO approach, particularly for content marketing. Internal linking has been picked as a priority for content marketing since it is one of the clearest and easiest ways to see an increase in SEO. Internal linking between blog posts and other content is also something you may achieve on a regular basis.

Internal linking is important for SEO, according to Google’s John Mueller, who suggests a strategic approach.

Internal linking, which extends beyond site breadcrumb navigation, is one of the “major things” a publisher can do to tell Google what content is the most significant, according to Google’s John Mueller, who responded to a question about it.

Breadcrumbs Navigation

Have you ever gotten lost on a website? Or don’t know how to get back to a page where you found some meaningful information?

This is the beauty of breadcrumb navigation, sometimes known as “breadcrumbs.”

Breadcrumb navigation appears horizontally across the top of a webpage, underneath the main navigation, title bars, and headers, and is more of a secondary component.

Because most search results link visitors to sites within your site, breadcrumbs assist visitors identify where they are in the site’s structure and make it easier for them to navigate to higher-level pages.

Breadcrumbs improve site usability and functionality by displaying the structure of all your site’s pages and removing the need to click through to other sites.

Why are breadcrumbs important?

Breadcrumbs tell users and search engines about the types of content available on your site, as well as how that content is structured. This not only helps search engines comprehend your pages, but it also helps site visitors understand what your site has to offer, encouraging them to stay longer.

Breadcrumb Structured Data

Internal navigation includes breadcrumb navigation, which is reflected in breadcrumb structured data.

Internal navigation allows site users to easily move across a website, switching back and forth between categories and subcategories to discover interesting content to read.

The user who asked the inquiry wanted to know if using breadcrumb structured data navigation for internal links is sufficient for SEO purposes.

This is the concern:

“Is internal linking still crucial for SEO if you have structured data for breadcrumbs set up?”

Internal Linking is very crucial

Internal linking, according to Google’s John Mueller, is a way to communicate with Google more than internal navigational links can.

He said

“Yes, absolutely.

It’s something where internal linking is supercritical for SEO.

I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.

And what you think is important is totally up to you.

You can decide to make things important where you earn the most money or you can make things important where you’re the strongest competitor or maybe you’re the weakest competitor.

With internal linking, you can really kind of focus things on those directions and those parts of your site.

And that’s not something that you can just replace with structured data.

So just because there is structured data on a page somewhere, I wouldn’t see that as a replacement for normal internal linking.

Even if in the structured data you also provide URLs, we don’t use those URLs in the same way as we would use normal internal links on a page.

So it’s definitely not the case that hreflang annotations replace links between country versions or breadcrumb annotations replace links between different levels of a website.

You should really have normal HTML links between the different parts of your website.

And ideally, you should not just have a basic set of links, but rather you should look at it in a strategic way and think about what do you care about the most and how can you highlight that with your internal linking.”

Relevance of internal linking

Internal linking is critical for any website because it aids in the development of site architecture and the distribution of link juice. Internal linking simply said, is any link from one page of a domain to another page inside the same domain. It could be a link to a section. 

Internal link development has various benefits, including improving website authority, usability, web page links, user experience, and even your rankings.

Internal linking can help your overall SEO performance in a variety of ways, including usability and link juice. A winning strategy is to have a solid internal architecture. Now that you’ve obtained the primary keys, it’s time to optimize your own!

Do you want to learn more about SEO and how an SEO-friendly website may help you?

Visit – 2022 In-depth SEO Guide with Proven Results for you.