Internal Linking: How to Connect the Pages of Your Site

Internal linking refers to all the links that connect the pages of a single site. It is one of the most accessible SEO levers, since it is entirely under your control.

What is it for?

• Helping robots discover your pages: Google explores the web by following links, and a page with no incoming link is hard to find.
• Providing context: the text of a link indicates what the destination page is about.
• Highlighting important pages: the more relevant internal links a page receives, the more essential it appears within your site.
• Guiding visitors: offering the logical next step improves the experience and time spent on the site.

Best practices

• Use real HTML links (<a href="...">). Links that rely only on a script may not be followed.
• Craft your anchors: descriptive text ("title tag guide") is more useful than "click here".
• Place links in the content, where they make sense for the reader, not only in menus and footers.
• Link related content: articles on the same topic, pillar page to detailed articles and back.
• Limit depth: important pages should be reachable within a few clicks from the homepage.
• Update links when you publish new content: add links from older articles to the new one.

Common mistakes

• Orphan pages: no other page links to them.
• Links to error pages (404) or needless redirects.
• Identical, over-optimized anchors.
• Too many links on one page, which dilutes their value and hurts readability.

How to audit your internal linking

An SEO crawler can list your site's internal links and spot orphan pages, poorly linked pages and broken links. Google Search Console also offers a report on the most frequently linked internal pages. Focus first on the strategic pages that generate revenue or leads.