What it looks like
An internal link is an ordinary a element whose address is on your own site.
<a href="/guides/storing-bread">our guide to storing bread</a>
A link that points to a different site is an external link. A link from another site to yours is a backlink.
Internal links appear in menus, footers and breadcrumbs. The most useful ones often sit inside the text of a page, where they connect one topic to a closely related one.
Why it matters
- Visitors find more. A good link offers the next thing a reader is likely to want.
- Search engines find pages. Crawlers move from page to page through links. A page with no internal links pointing to it is called an orphan page, and crawling may never reach it.
- Links show importance. Pages you link to often, from prominent places, look more important than pages you link to once from deep in the site.
- Links give context. The anchor text tells search engines what the linked page is about.
COMMON MISTAKEPublishing a new page and never linking to it. A sitemap entry helps, but a link from a relevant page that already gets visits is the most reliable way to get it found.
How to check yours
- Pick an important page. Starting from your homepage, count the clicks it takes to reach it. As a rule of thumb, more than three suggests the page is buried.
- Search your own site for the page's topic. Note which pages mention the topic without linking to the page.
- Add a link from two or three of those pages, using descriptive words as the link text.
- Click every link you added. Each should open a live page directly, not pass through a redirect.
The lesson an internal linking plan you can reuse turns these steps into a routine.