Summary: Internal links are links from one page on your website to another page on the same site. They are how visitors move around, how Google discovers your pages and understands which ones matter, and how ranking strength flows from your strongest pages to the ones you want to rank. Most business sites have too few internal links to the pages that make money and too many to pages that do not. Fixing that is one of the cheapest, fastest improvements in SEO, because it needs no new content and no outside help.
Internal linking is the part of SEO that businesses skip because it looks trivial. A link from one page to another: how much can that matter? In practice it is one of the first things we fix on a new client site and one of the few changes that shows in rankings within weeks. This guide explains what internal links are, what they do, what a bad internal link profile looks like on a real business site, and how to fix yours in the right order. It is written for a business owner or marketing manager with a WordPress site and no developer on call.
An internal link is any hyperlink that points from one page on your domain to another page on the same domain. Your main menu, your footer, the “related posts” under an article, a link in a paragraph to your pricing page: all internal links. They differ from external links, which point to other websites, and from backlinks, which are links from other websites to yours.
Internal links do three jobs at once. They let visitors find what they came for. They let search engine crawlers find every page and understand how pages relate. And they pass ranking strength, often called link equity, from pages that have it to pages that need it.
Internal linking sits between on-page SEO and technical SEO: the content decides what to link, the structure decides whether Google can follow it.
Googlebot reaches most pages by following links from pages it already knows. A page nothing links to, an orphan page, may never be found, or may be found through the sitemap and then treated as unimportant because nothing on the site points to it. Our guide to indexing covers the mechanics.
Pages with many internal links, especially from important pages like the homepage, read as important. Pages with one link from a footer read as the opposite. If your most valuable service page has two internal links and a three-year-old blog post has forty, you have told Google the blog post is the page that matters.
Authority earned by one page, through backlinks or its own ranking, flows through its internal links to the pages it points at. A well-linked service page borrows strength from the guides, articles and homepage that link to it. A poorly-linked one starts from nothing every time.
The words used in a link, the anchor text, tell Google what the destination page covers. A hundred links reading “click here” say nothing. A dozen reading “emergency boiler repair in Preston” say a great deal. Our guide to anchor text covers the types and how to vary them.
A set of pages on one subject, linked to each other and to a central guide, shows Google the site covers that subject properly. This is the basis of topical authority, and it is why a site with thirty connected pages on a topic outranks one with three hundred unconnected ones.
A reader who finishes an article and sees a relevant next step takes it. One who sees nothing leaves. Internal links are how a guide turns into an enquiry.
Before starting work on a site we crawl it and count the internal links pointing at each page. The pattern is consistent enough that we can usually predict it before the crawl finishes:
The result is a site whose internal links tell Google the blog is the point of the business and the services are an afterthought. Reversing that, without writing a word of new content, is usually the first thing we do.
| Type | Where it lives | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Navigational | Main menu, mega menu | Getting visitors to core pages; tells Google the site’s structure |
| Contextual | Inside paragraphs of body copy | The most valuable type for SEO: carries anchor text and topical relevance |
| Footer | Site footer | Secondary navigation; weak signal because it appears on every page |
| Breadcrumb | Top of inner pages | Shows hierarchy to visitors and Google; mark up with structured data |
| Related content | Below articles, sidebars | Keeps readers moving; only useful if the suggestions are actually related |
| Call to action | Buttons and banners | Drives enquiries; carries little SEO value because the anchor is generic |
Contextual links in body copy do most of the SEO work. Menu and footer links are necessary but they appear on every page, so Google discounts them as signals of what any one page is about.
List the pages that generate business: service pages, product categories, the pricing page, the contact page. These should be the most internally linked pages on the site after the homepage. Everything else exists to support them.
For each subject you want to rank for, have one main guide and a set of supporting SEO content that answers the specific questions underneath it. The guide links to every supporting page with descriptive anchor text. Every supporting page links back to the guide and to the service page it relates to. Supporting pages link to each other where it helps the reader. This is the hub-and-spoke structure, and it is how the content on this site is organised.
A page that takes five clicks to reach from the homepage reads as unimportant and gets crawled less often. Service pages should be one click away, in the menu. Main guides one or two. Nothing that matters should be more than three.
Find the pages on your site with the most backlinks or the best rankings (Search Console and a backlink tool will show them). Add contextual links from those pages to the service or product pages you want to lift. This is the quickest internal linking win there is.
Anchor text should describe the destination in natural language: “our guide to choosing a wedding venue”, “local SEO services in Blackpool”. Vary it. Twenty links with the identical keyword phrase look manufactured; twenty links that each describe the page slightly differently look like writing.
Google credits the first link it finds to a given destination on a page; further links to the same place add nothing and clutter the copy. Pick the best spot and link once.
Google has no number. The honest answer is: as many as the reader would find useful, placed where they would find them useful. A 2,000-word guide might carry ten to fifteen contextual links comfortably. A short service page might carry three. The mistakes are at the extremes: pages with none, and pages where every other sentence is a link. If you are counting, you are probably overthinking it; if you have no links in the body copy, you are underthinking it.
| Mistake | Fix |
|---|---|
| Orphan pages: nothing links to them | Link from the relevant guide or service page, or remove the page. Our article on orphan pages explains how to find them. |
| Service pages with only menu and footer links | Add contextual links from guides, articles and the homepage body copy |
| Broken internal links pointing at deleted or moved pages | Fix at source: update the link to the live page. Redirects are the fallback, not the fix. See our guide to 404s. |
| Redirect chains: links pointing at URLs that redirect | Update the link to the final URL |
| Generic anchor text: “click here”, “read more”, “this article” | Rewrite to describe the destination |
| Identical keyword anchor text repeated across the site | Vary the phrasing |
| Nofollow on internal links | Remove it. It tells Google not to follow your own links and wastes crawl budget; there is no reason to use it internally. |
| Links buried in images or JavaScript that crawlers cannot follow | Use standard HTML anchor tags with real href attributes |
| Linking every mention of every term | One link per destination per page, placed where it helps |
The block editor makes contextual links easy: highlight the text, press the link button (or Ctrl/Cmd K), and start typing the page title; WordPress searches your own pages and posts. The Rank Math SEO plugin, which this site uses, adds internal link suggestions in the editor sidebar and a Link Counter that shows how many internal links each post has and receives. Yoast offers a similar suggestions feature in its paid version. For an audit across the whole site, Screaming Frog’s free crawl (up to 500 URLs) lists every internal link, its anchor text, and the number of inlinks per page, which is the fastest way to find orphan pages and under-linked service pages. Fix broken links in place rather than relying on a plugin to redirect them.
AI systems that answer questions, whether Google’s AI Overviews or assistants such as ChatGPT, rely on the same crawl as search. Pages they cannot find through links they cannot cite. Clear clusters with descriptive anchor text also help these systems understand what a site is an authority on, which is what decides whether a business gets recommended. Internal linking is not a separate job for AI search; it is the same job with more riding on it.
Internal linking is usually the first structural change we make on a client site, before new content and before link building, because it costs nothing and shows quickly. We crawl, map the clusters, fix what is broken and point the site’s strength at the pages that earn. Our SEO packages include this as standard, and if you would like to see what your own internal link profile looks like, we offer a free SEO audit.
Yes. They are how Google discovers pages, judges their importance and understands their topic, and they pass ranking strength between pages. For most business sites they are the biggest unused lever.
Internal links are between pages on your own site. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. You control the first completely and the second hardly at all, which is why internal links are the place to start. Our guide to backlinks covers the other side.
No. Opening in a new tab is for external links, where you want the visitor to keep your site open. Internal links should behave like ordinary navigation.
Links in the main body copy carry more weight than links in menus, footers and sidebars, which appear on every page. A contextual link high in the copy is the most valuable placement.
Only in the sense that a page where everything is linked reads badly and dilutes the signal. There is no penalty, but there is a point of diminishing returns well before a hundred links.
See also, our complete guide to SEO for UK businesses.
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