Why it's important
Internal links are an important SEO factor as they tend to enhance the usability and conversion rates for your website. Doing this correctly guides users and search engines to your most valuable pages, and also ensures that they are seen as relevant for the correct terms.
You also have far more control over your internal linking to ensure that your website doesn’t become over-optimized and become seen as a spam site by search engines.
Getting it done
Try to make your website hierarchy as flat as possible - your pages should be accessible in as few clicks as possible. Don't try to link to every page though, best practice is 100 links or less per page, internal and external combined. Don't optimize links to your homepage as you should have a home button or linked logo on each page.
To optimize the flow of link juice to your conversion pages, use in-text links (also known as editorial links). Use keywords in the anchor text, but not every time - over-optimization can be just as bad as under-optimization. Add links to your most important pages near the top of your content so they are crawled and weighted appropriately.
Finally, if you don't do so already, regularly crawl your site to find internal links to broken pages or redirects so you can reclaim these links. Be sure to make outbound links nofollow if you don't want to pass any link juice onto those sites.
External resources
- Check your internal & external links with Google Search Console in the Links section