What is internal linking?
It's linking from one page on your website to another: from your menu, your footer, your breadcrumbs and, most usefully, from inside the text of your pages.
Visitors use those links to find what they need next. Search engines use them to discover pages and understand how your site fits together. A page with no links pointing at it is hard for both to find.
Why does internal linking matter for SEO?
Google's own guidance says it uses links to find new pages and as a signal of what those pages are about. The words you link with tell Google what to expect on the other side.
Links also show which pages matter most. If every relevant guide links to your main service page, you're telling search engines that's the page to show for that topic. And they keep visitors moving towards an enquiry instead of leaving after one article.
What makes a good internal link?
Four things, all from Google's link guidance or plain common sense.
- It's a real link: a standard HTML link with an address, not a button that only works with a script.
- The anchor text says where it goes. "Our Google Ads management" beats "click here" or "read more".
- It's relevant. Link where the reader would naturally want to go next, not to every page you have.
- It goes to the final address, not through a redirect or to a page that no longer exists.
How should you structure links across a site?
Think in groups. Each main service page sits at the top of its topic, and the guides and posts about that topic sit underneath it.
Every guide links up to its service page. The service page links down to its best guides. Guides in the same group link to each other where it helps. Breadcrumbs show where each page sits. This keeps related pages close together and makes the structure obvious to search engines and visitors alike.
How do you fix internal linking step by step?
Work through these seven steps once, then add links every time you publish.
- List your money pages: the service or product pages you most want people to land on.
- Group every other page under the money page it relates to.
- Crawl the site, or check Search Console's Links report, to see which pages have few or no internal links.
- Fix orphan pages first: link each one from at least one relevant page, or remove it if it has no job.
- Add a link from every guide up to its money page, using words that describe that page.
- Replace vague anchors such as "click here" with descriptive ones.
- Update links that point at redirects or missing pages so they go straight to the live page.
How many internal links should a page have?
There's no magic number. Add the links a reader would find useful and stop there. A page stuffed with links makes each one less useful and the page harder to read.
As a working habit, every new post links to its service page and to two or three closely related posts, and at least one older page links back to it.
What internal linking mistakes should you avoid?
These are the ones we find most often in audits.
- Orphan pages that nothing links to.
- Important pages only reachable through a site search or a filter.
- The same vague anchor text, such as "learn more", on every link.
- Links that go through one or more redirects.
- Adding nofollow to your own internal links. You want Google to follow them.