Think of the word “SEO” for a second. What comes to mind?

Keywords. Backlinks. Content.

These are all extremely important, but the humble internal link—one from your own site to another page on your site—is often overlooked. Why? Honestly, I don’t know.

Yet, internal links undoubtedly have a huge effect on your search rankings. Once they get “juice” from external links, their owner power is amplified to a massive degree. How can you get the most out of your internal links? That I do have the answers to. And they go like this:

(1) Internal Links Always Primarily Focus on User Experience (UX)

The best SEO directs your visitors to what they want—fast! Maybe they want to learn more about a specific topic or research your product or service before a potential purchase. No matter your search listing title, the resource visitors are driven to must deliver on what your title promises.

Internal links are sometimes used to answer additional user questions. They can also drive users to product or service pages that aim to sell (if users originally land on a blog post or report, for example). When users enjoy good experiences on your website, they stay longer, come back, and link to you. Internal links indirectly drive SEO value precisely in this manner.

Compare that to an internal link merely present for SEO purposes. Perhaps it shows up in the first paragraph of a blog post where users aren’t yet ready to buy or learn more. Confused and/or annoyed, they make a conscious decision to avoid clicking on it.

Sure, you get SEO value in this example—but not as much as you would if you had waited until the end of the post to promote your service.

(2) Internal Links Drive SEO Value to Pages You Want to Rank Most

While user experience is your first concern, you can more directly drive SEO value by linking to pages you want to rank most. You can do this easily (and naturally!) from your blog. Focus on that word: naturally. Why? Because if you, say, link to your service page from every single blog post, this looks unnatural to your users and search engines.

You won’t get as many clicks or as much love from the search engines, but if you link to your service pages from a few posts—where it makes sense—you have a natural fit. Users won’t notice anything unusual, and neither will search engines. By controlling the SEO value flow in this manner, you give exact website pages greater opportunity to rank high.

(3) Internal Links Should Be Optimized for Your Keywords

With external links, you should only optimize the anchor text on 1 in 100 links. And while it’s fine if you do this 0 times, Google does not like this much at all.

On the flip side, the search giant doesn’t care if you do this with internal links—so go ahead and do so to get a little more out of these. Internal links may not get the attention they deserve, but that’s no problem for you. Armed with this information, you’re suddenly a big problem for your competitors.