Internal Linking

Hyperlinks that point from one page on a website to another page on the same website.

Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page on your website to another page on the same website. It serves multiple functions: helping users navigate to related content, distributing link equity through the site, and helping search engines understand the site's topic hierarchy and the relative importance of pages.

Strategic internal linking involves linking from high-authority pages (e.g. popular blog posts, your homepage) to priority pages you want to rank better (e.g. service pages, commercial landing pages). This is one of the few levers you have full control over in SEO.

From a crawlability perspective, internal links are how search engine crawlers discover new pages. Pages with no internal links pointing to them ('orphan pages') may not be discovered or crawled regularly, even if they appear in your sitemap.

Best practices for internal linking: use descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text; link to topically related pages within the body of the content; maintain a sensible depth (important pages should be reachable within a few clicks from the homepage); and audit regularly to fix broken internal links.