Internal linking: how to help people and search engines find your best pages

Internal links are the links between pages on your own site. They are one of the few parts of SEO entirely under your control, and they do three jobs at once: they help visitors find related content, help search engines discover pages, and show which pages you consider important.

Why they matter

• Discovery. Search engines find most pages by following links. A page with no internal links pointing to it (an "orphan" page) may be found late, or not at all, even if it is in your sitemap.
• Context. The words in a link, and the text around it, help describe the page it points to.
• Priority. Pages linked from many places, such as your navigation, home page and popular articles, are signalled as important. Pages buried several clicks deep are signalled as less so.

Make links that search engines can follow

Google can follow links reliably when they are standard <a> elements with an href containing a URL. Menus and buttons built only with JavaScript click handlers may not be followed. See JavaScript SEO basics if your site relies on JavaScript.

Choose good anchor text

Google's guidance is to use anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it links to.

• Better: "see our guide to local SEO for service businesses"
• Worse: "click here", or a whole sentence as the link
• Avoid: cramming the same exact keyword into every link to a page. Natural variation reads better and describes the page just as well.

A simple process

1. List the pages that matter most: the services, products or guides that bring enquiries or sales.
2. Find pages that should link to them. Search your own site for the topic (a site:yourdomain.com topic search works), and look at your most visited pages in analytics.
3. Add links where they help the reader, in the body text where the topic comes up, not just in footers.
4. Find orphans. Crawl the site with a tool such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and compare the pages found by crawling with the pages in your sitemap.
5. Fix broken internal links and redirect chains the crawl reports, so links point straight at the final URL.

Structures that help

• Hub pages that introduce a topic and link to every detailed page about it, with each detailed page linking back.
• Breadcrumbs that show where a page sits in the site, which also give search engines a clear structure.
• "Related" links at the end of articles and products, chosen by topic rather than at random.

Things not to worry about

• Number of links on a page. There is no fixed limit; keep links useful and the page readable.
• Nofollow on internal links. You do not need it to "save" anything; if a page should not be indexed, use noindex instead.

For more on-page topics, ask in the Content and on-page community.