Internal Linking: A Practical Guide

1. What internal links do

An internal link is any link from one page on your site to another. They do two big jobs. First, they help people move through your site — the obvious one. Second, and more importantly for SEO, they help Google. As Google explains in how Search works, Googlebot discovers new pages by following links, so a page that nothing links to can be hard for Google to find at all. Google's own guidance on making links crawlable is blunt about this: links need to be real <a href> tags pointing to real URLs, or Google may not follow them.

Beyond discovery, internal links give Google context. The pages you link to, and the words you use to link, signal what a page is about and how it relates to the rest of your site. Done consistently, this is how you build topical structure that search engines can read.

2. How they spread authority

When a page earns links from other sites, it accumulates authority. Internal links pass a share of that authority along to the pages they point to — so where you link from your strongest pages decides which other pages get a boost. This is the part most site owners never use deliberately.

Think of it as a flow. Your homepage and a few popular posts usually hold the most authority. If those pages link to a page you want to rank, you're channelling strength toward it. If your most important commercial or pillar pages are buried five clicks deep with nothing pointing at them, you're starving them. A good rule of thumb: every page that matters should be reachable within a few clicks of the homepage, and the pages you most want to rank should collect the most internal links. Google's SEO starter guide makes the same point — clear navigation and links between related pages help people and search engines find your content.

3. Anchor text that helps

Anchor text is the clickable words in a link. For internal links, descriptive anchor text is a gift to Google — it states plainly what the destination is about. Link with “our guide to keyword research” rather than “click here” or a bare URL. You don't need to force an exact keyword every time, and you shouldn't make every anchor identical, but the words should genuinely describe the target page.

Keep it natural. Internal anchor text gives you more freedom than external links do — it's your own site — but stuffing the same keyword-rich anchor into dozens of links reads as manipulation to both users and Google. Vary the phrasing while keeping it relevant.

4. A simple linking strategy

You don't need a complicated system. This routine covers most of the value:

• Decide your priority pages — the handful of pillar guides or commercial pages you most want to rank.
• Link to them from relevant context — whenever you write or update a related post, add a natural link to the priority page.
• Link out from the priority pages too — pillar pages should link down to the supporting articles around them, forming clusters Google can map.
• Connect new posts on publish — every time you publish, add two or three links from existing pages so the new page isn't an orphan.
• Audit periodically for orphan pages — anything with no internal links pointing to it — and fix them.

Finding the best spots to add links by hand across a whole site is tedious. An internal link suggestion tool can scan your content and surface relevant pages you could link to and from, so you're adding links where they're contextually justified rather than guessing.

5. Common mistakes to avoid

A few habits quietly undermine otherwise good linking. Don't bury links in images with no real href or in JavaScript Google can't follow — if it isn't a crawlable link, it doesn't count. Don't point dozens of links at low-value pages just to fill space; relevance matters more than volume. Avoid generic anchors like “read more” on links you care about. And don't leave your best new content orphaned — a brilliant post nothing links to is a post Google may struggle to find and rank.

Internal linking rewards consistency more than cleverness. Build the habit of connecting every page to the relevant ones around it, and over months you'll have a site structure that both readers and Google can navigate — without spending a cent on links.