Internal Linking Basics

Every page on your site is either easy for Google to reach or it is not, and what decides that is the links between your own pages. Internal linking is the least glamorous part of SEO, and one of the very few parts you control completely — no outreach, no budget, no waiting on anyone else.

What an internal link is

An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another page on the same site. The blue words you click are the anchor text. That is the whole definition. A link to somebody else's site is an external link — and seen from their side, a backlink, which is a different thing with different rules.

Picture a bakery site. The homepage links to the menu. The menu links to a page about the sourdough. A blog post about slow fermentation links back to that sourdough page. Someone reading about fermentation can now reach the thing they might actually buy in one click, without going back to the menu and hunting for it.

That is the job. Internal links are the corridors of your site. A page with no corridor leading to it is a room with no door.

How Google actually uses them

Google finds new pages mainly by following links from pages it already knows about. This is crawling, the first of the three steps in how Google Search works. A page that nothing links to — not your menu, not your sitemap, not another article — is a page Google has no route to.

Google can only follow a real link: an <a> tag with an href attribute pointing at a real address. A clickable box wired up with JavaScript, a button that swaps the content without changing the URL, or a menu that only appears after a script loads may all look like navigation to a visitor and be invisible as navigation to a crawler.

The anchor text matters too. Google uses the words inside the link to work out what the destination page is about. "Our sourdough method" describes the page it points at. "Click here" describes nothing, which is why it is worth the three extra seconds to write the real words.

There is one thing internal links do not do: they are not a dial you can turn up. Adding forty links to a page does not push it up the results, and Google publishes no correct number of internal links for a page to have.

What to do

• Check that every page you care about can be reached from your homepage in three clicks or fewer. If you cannot get there, neither can a reader.
• Write anchor text that describes the destination. Read the link words on their own — if they do not tell you where you are going, rewrite them.
• When you publish something new, add a link to it from an older page on the same subject. A new page with nothing pointing at it is the slowest kind to get found.
• Link out of your articles to the pages that earn you something: the service, the product, the contact form. An article a reader cannot act on is a dead end.
• Use ordinary <a href> links for navigation, even when a fancier control looks better.

Common mistakes

Orphan pages. A page that exists, sits in no menu, and is linked from nowhere. It usually happens after a redesign, when a section is dropped from the navigation but the pages stay behind. They are invisible to visitors and nearly invisible to Google.

The same anchor text everywhere. Linking to your contact page as "affordable web design services" from thirty different articles is not description, it is stuffing. Write the words each sentence actually needs.

Linking for the sake of it. A paragraph with four links in it is harder to read, and a reader bouncing between pages without finding anything is not a win. One useful link beats five decorative ones.

Sources: SEO Starter Guide and Make your links crawlable.