On-Page

What Is Internal Linking?

Internal linking is the practice of linking from one page of your site to another, using descriptive anchor text, so that readers and crawlers can move between related pages.

Why it matters

It is the part of link building you fully control. Internal links help search engines find pages and understand how they relate, they spread whatever authority your strongest pages have to the ones that need it, and they keep readers moving through your site.

Example

A hard-won link lands on your blog post about contractor payroll. Adding a link from that post to your pricing page passes some of the benefit onward to a page that will never attract links on its own.

Common misconception

That internal links do not matter once you are buying external ones. The opposite is closer to true: an external link to an orphaned page that links nowhere wastes most of what you paid for. Internal linking is what turns one earned link into value for a whole section of the site.

Related terms

Anchor Text The visible, clickable words of a hyperlink. Link Equity The ranking value a link passes to its destination. Backlink A link on another website that points to yours. Topical Relevance How closely a linking site's subject matches your own.

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