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SEO – Internal Linking

Internal links are links from one page of your website to another page of the same website. They are one of the easiest and most powerful SEO tools, because you control them fully.

Why internal links are important

  • Crawling: bots find new pages by following links. A page with no link to it (an orphan page) may never be found.
  • Context: the anchor text tells what the linked page is about.
  • Importance: pages which get many internal links from important pages are seen as more important.
  • Visitors: readers move to related content and stay longer.

Types of internal links

TypeExample
NavigationMain menu, footer links
ContextualLinks inside the text of an article
BreadcrumbsHome > SEO Tutorial > Internal Linking
Related postsA list of similar articles at the end of a post
PaginationPrevious and Next links in a series

Best practices

  • Link from old, strong pages to new pages, and from new pages to the old ones.
  • Use descriptive anchor text, see Anchor Tag.
  • Link to pages which are really related. A link in the wrong place helps nobody.
  • Keep important pages within three clicks from the home page.
  • Use normal HTML links (<a href>), because bots may not follow links which only work with JavaScript click events.

Topic clusters

Make one main page for a big topic (a pillar page), and many detail pages for the sub topics. Link them to each other. Here in this tutorial, the page SEO Introduction is the base, and every chapter is a part of the cluster.

Breadcrumbs

<nav aria-label="Breadcrumb">
  <a href="/">Home</a> &gt;
  <a href="/seo/">SEO Tutorial</a> &gt;
  <span>Internal Linking</span>
</nav>

Breadcrumbs show the path to the user, and they give extra internal links. You can also add BreadcrumbList structured data, see Structured Data.

Find orphan pages

  1. Get the list of all pages from your sitemap or a crawler tool.
  2. Get the list of pages which have internal links from a crawl.
  3. Pages in the first list but not in the second are orphan pages. Add links to them, or remove them if they are not needed.
Note: When you publish a new article, take five minutes to add two or three links to it from related old articles. Many people forget this step. Next: Page Structure.

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