Internal linking is the practice of linking pages on your website to other pages on the same website. Menus, footer links, breadcrumbs and links inside your paragraphs all count. They guide visitors to the next useful page and show search engines how your content fits together and which pages matter most.
What internal links do for search engines
Crawlers follow links to find pages, so a page linked from many places gets found quickly and revisited often. Links also pass a share of ranking value: a page your homepage and service pages all point to is treated as more important than one buried in an archive. The clickable words, called anchor text, tell Google what the destination is about. Google's documentation recommends descriptive anchor text and crawlable <a href> links.
The opposite, a link from your site to someone else's, is an external link, and a link from another site to yours is a backlink.
Linking a blog post into the services that pay the bills
An accountant writes a post titled "What expenses can sole traders claim?". At the point where the post mentions filing deadlines, it links to her "Self Assessment tax returns" service page with that phrase as the link text. At the end, it links to a related article on mileage allowance. Her service page, in turn, links back to the expenses article as a helpful read. A reader moves from a free answer to the paid service in one click, and Google sees a clear cluster of pages about sole-trader tax.
How much effort a small site needs
On a ten-page site, a clear menu and a few in-text links usually cover it. It starts to matter once you publish regularly: every new article or service page should link to at least one relevant older page and receive a link from one, so nothing becomes an orphan page. Links in the body text carry more context than another menu entry.
Internal linking mistakes
- "Click here" anchors, which tell neither readers nor Google what is on the other side.
- Exact-match keyword anchors on every link. Natural variety reads better and avoids looking manipulative.
- Linking to redirected or broken URLs after pages are renamed.
- Dozens of links in one paragraph, which dilutes each one and annoys readers.
- Adding nofollow to your own links, which stops the value from flowing to your pages.
Related terms
- Anchor text: the words a link is attached to.
- Breadcrumb navigation: a structured form of internal links.
- Backlink: a link from another website, the external counterpart.
- On-page SEO: the wider set of page-level work internal links support.