Internal links are links from one page on your site to another. They do two things at once: they help visitors move on to relevant content, and they show search engines how your site is structured and which pages matter most.
Why internal links are indispensable
Search engines can only find and value pages if there's a path to them. A page nothing links to — an "orphan page" — is much harder for Google to discover and picks up almost no link value. The more relevant internal links point at a page, the stronger the signal that the page matters.
How to do it well
- Link relevant pages to each other, for example from a blog article to a service or product page that fits naturally.
- Use descriptive anchor text — the clickable words themselves — instead of "click here" or "read more". "Check out our SSL certificates" tells both visitor and search engine exactly what's on the other end.
- Link from new content to existing, important pages, so those pages benefit from the attention the new piece attracts.
- Make sure no page ever dead-ends on a 404 — use redirects whenever a page moves.
- Keep link depth shallow: important pages should be reachable within two or three clicks from the homepage.
Internal links on large, dynamic sites
With dynamic pages — records that automatically get their own page, like this entire knowledge hub — it's especially important to link related content together automatically, for example through a previous/next navigation or a related-articles block at the bottom of the page.
An example you're reading right now
This whole SEO hub is itself an example of it: every tip links through to the related tips, such as compelling titles and structured data, so visitors — and Google — can explore the full topic with ease.
A concrete example
Say you have a page about hosting and a page about SSL certificates. From the hosting article you can naturally write: "Every site we host automatically gets an SSL certificate", linking those words to the SSL page. That's stronger than a bare "more info here", because the anchor text itself already tells both the visitor and Google what's on the other end. Repeat this pattern across your site and a web of relevant, mutually reinforcing pages emerges naturally, instead of a collection of isolated islands.
Measuring and adjusting
Check your analytics to see which pages get few internal references and little traffic, and add targeted links from relevant, well-visited pages. Internal link building isn't a one-off task — it grows with every new page you add.