A lot of emphasis is put on incoming links to a website as they help to increase the exposure of the website and help to increase the position in the search engine pages (SERPS). For SEO however, a good internal link structure is vital and there are several good reasons for this.
Before getting to those reasons here are a couple of FAQ’s on internal links.
What is an internal link
An internal link is a link that points to another page or post within the same website. For example, navigation menus will almost always point to structured data (category links, parent links etc), latest posts on a blog will point to the most recent content and so on – these are all types of internal links. Some sites even have ‘related content’ after each post.
How can this help?
There are 2 ways that this helps you.
1. It passes ‘link juice’ to inner pages on your site. When you have an inbound link to your site, it will carry a certain amount of link juice – or credit, if you prefer – from the site that is linking to you. As noted earlier, it helps to improve your rankings in the search engines. However, some of that juice is also going to be passed onto any links that are on the page that was linked too on your site.
2. It makes the user experience better. A lot is written about SEO and search engines, and sadly this often means that people overlook the fundementals on their website or blog. You must pay attention to the user experience too – if your site contrasts too much, if its too hard to navigate or if its cluttered with ads then they will not want to stay for very long and certainly wont want to come back.
What are the benefits
See above – a better user experience and more exposure for your inner pages in the search engines.
Anything else?
One final point… You may have heard of the term ‘link sculpting’ or similar. This is recommended by some people and involves using the “nofollow” tag in your internal links. A link with the nofollow tag will act as a normal hyperlink but will NOT pass on any link juice.
The idea is to use nofollow on posts with low priority so more link juice gets passed onto the others. If this is something that has been recommended to you or if you are interested in doing it, then I would suggest you do no do this – this video explains why you shouldnt use nofollow on internal links. (<– that was an internal link by the way 
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