What exactly are backlinks to inner pages?

Question

I've been trying to get better SEO for a while. One of the tools I've been trying has suggested,

You must also build backlinks to your site's internal pages to help Google™ bots crawl and index your web pages.

There are links on the front page to other pages in the site. None of the information I can find really explains what those links actually are, what they look like in a page.

If it helps to answer the question, I do have an updated sitemap thats updated about once a week, it gets resubmitted at least twice a month. The urls in the site are friendly urls.

Answer 1

Backlinks to inner pages are link from external websites (e.g. not your website) that link to pages that are not your homepage. The reason why this is good is because search engines rank individual web pages, not websites. And links from external websites are an important part of Google's, and probably other, search engines' ranking algorithm. So by getting external backlinks to your inner pages helps them to rank well.

This is a good thing since the more pages you have that rank well for relevant search terms the more traffic your website will get. Also, because internal pages contain your actual content, users will be more likely to find the content they are looking for. This means more potential pages views, etc.

Answer 2

You can external backlinks to your websites internal pages from the same sources as backlinks to your homepage. The easiest would be from Social Bookmarking sites, articles submissions where you write and pre-link the articles yourself, forum profile links, and other things like that.

These will not carry a lot of value but will build up an overall natural backlink profile of your website.

Answer 3

Social bookmarking sites, article submission sites, and PR sites have been hit hard since the end of 2013 and some have experienced severe penalties.

Organic backlinks are what Google prefers.

Any link from another site to your sites pages rather than the home page is known as a deep-link. This is what you should strive for. However, I do warn against creating too many backlinks yourself. Instead, my favorite recommendation is to use Twitter to gain a following and drive traffic to your pages. If your content is good, then people will link to you. It is that simple.