An internal link is a link from one page of your website to another. Links tell Google which pages matter and what relates to what, and they take the reader to the next step. Good linking is the cheapest way to improve search visibility, because it needs no new pages.

A page that many pages link to looks important to Google. See which pages your website links to most. If the answer is the privacy policy and not your main service page, the linking is not supporting your goals.

The best place for a link is inside the text, where a question occurs to the reader. When a guide mentions indexing, the link to the indexing guide belongs in that sentence, not in a “read also” list at the bottom.

From every guide there must be a way to the service that solves the same problem. From every service page there must be a way to the guides that answer the more specific questions.

Write link text that says where the link leads

  • Poor: Read more [here].
  • Good: Read [what determines the cost of SEO].

Link text tells both the reader and Google what is on the target page. Vary the wording naturally. The same exact keyword does not need repeating in every link.

Find the orphan pages

An orphan page is one that no other page links to. Google finds it only through the sitemap and treats it as unimportant. Go through your important pages and make sure each can be reached from at least two others.

Google has to be able to follow the link. That means an ordinary a element with an href address. A button that works only with JavaScript is not a link to Google.

Link straight to the final address, not to one that redirects onward. On a multilingual website, link to the page in the same language.

When you publish a new page, add links from it to two or three related pages, and go and add a link to the new page from two or three old ones. The latter is almost always forgotten.

A wider review of the link structure is part of an SEO audit. We cover planning the structure in the content plan guide.

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