Content Strategy, Link Building & Measurement
Internal Linking for SEO: A Practical Guide
How internal links help visitors and search engines, how to plan topic hubs and supporting pages, how to write descriptive anchor text and a simple process to find and fix weak internal linking on a WordPress site.
Last reviewed: 14 October 2026
Internal links are links from one page on your website to another page on the same website. They help visitors find related information, and they help search engines discover pages and understand how your content fits together. Internal linking is one of the few SEO tasks that is entirely in your control and costs nothing, yet it is often done carelessly.
Why internal links matter
- Discovery: search engines find pages mainly by following links. A page with no internal links pointing to it (an “orphan page”) may be found late or not at all.
- Context: the text of a link and the words around it help explain what the linked page is about.
- Importance: pages linked from many relevant pages, and from your main navigation, are clearly important to your site.
- User journeys: good links move a reader from a beginner topic to a deeper guide, or from an article to the relevant service page.
Plan a simple topic structure
Before adding links randomly, decide how your content is organised. A common approach is a hub and supporting pages:
- A hub page gives an overview of a broad topic and links to the detailed pages.
- Supporting pages each cover one specific question and link back to the hub and to closely related pages.
Our Free SEO Course works this way: the hub lists the lessons by topic, and each lesson links to the next lesson and back to the hub. This blog’s categories follow the same idea.
| Hub | Supporting pages (examples) |
|---|---|
| Local SEO overview | Google Business Profile checklist, local ranking factors, reviews guide, local landing pages |
| Technical SEO overview | Crawling and indexing, sitemaps and robots.txt, canonicals, Core Web Vitals, structured data |
Write descriptive anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link.
- Good: “read our Google Business Profile checklist“
- Weak: “click here”, “read more”, “this article”
Guidelines:
- Describe what the reader will find on the linked page.
- Keep it natural; it does not need to repeat an exact keyword every time.
- Vary the wording when you link to the same page from different articles.
- Avoid linking every repetition of a keyword on a page.
Where to place internal links
- In the body, where the related topic is mentioned and the reader would benefit from more detail.
- At the end, as a clear next step: the next lesson, a deeper guide or the relevant service.
- In navigation and hubs, for your most important pages.
- From strong pages: pages that already get traffic or external links can pass visitors to newer pages.
Do not add dozens of links to every page. Each link should help the reader at that point.
A practical process for an existing site
- List your important pages: services, contact page, main guides.
- Find orphan or weakly linked pages. In WordPress, check whether each important page is linked from at least two or three relevant pages. Crawling tools, or the Links report in Google Search Console, can show how many internal links each page has.
- Find linking opportunities. Search your site for mentions of a topic, for example the phrase “Google Business Profile”, and add a link to your guide where it genuinely helps.
- Fix broken internal links and links that go through redirects; link directly to the final URL.
- Check anchor text for “click here” and replace it with descriptive wording.
- Recheck after publishing new content, and link to it from at least two older related pages.
Common mistakes
- Orphan pages that only exist in the sitemap.
- Linking only from a “related posts” widget and never in the body text.
- Using the same exact-match anchor text on every page.
- Linking to old URLs that now redirect.
- Linking only to service pages, so readers never find helpful guides.
- Pointing several internal links to a page you no longer want to rank, such as an outdated article.
Internal links and AI search
Google’s guidance for its AI features in Search includes making content findable through internal links, the same advice as for classic search. A well-linked site helps any system that relies on crawling to understand what you offer. See Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: what website owners should know.
Practice task
Choose one important page on a site you know. Find three other relevant pages on the same site that should link to it, write the sentence and anchor text you would add on each page, and note why each link helps a reader. Add this to your SEO portfolio.
Common questions
How many internal links should a page have?
There is no fixed number. Add links where they genuinely help a reader continue, usually several in a long guide and fewer on a short page. Avoid long lists of unrelated links.
Do internal links in menus and footers count?
Yes, they are internal links and they help discovery. But links in the body text give more context about how pages relate, so use both.
Should internal links open in a new tab?
Usually not. Internal links normally open in the same tab, which is what most visitors expect.
Next step
Internal links are one part of on-page SEO. Continue with our free lesson how to do on-page SEO, and read the content audit guide to decide which pages deserve the most links. Internal link structure and anchor text are practised in the On-Page SEO module of our SEO Course in Pune.
Sources (checked 14 October 2026): Google Search Central, AI features and your website and In-depth guide to how Google Search works.