What is Internal Linking?
Links between pages on your own site, which distribute authority and tell search engines how your content relates.
A worked example
A site's highest-margin service page sits four clicks from the homepage with two internal links pointing at it, while a tag archive nobody reads has forty. Restructuring so the service page is two clicks deep with links from every related article costs nothing and frequently moves rankings within weeks.
Why it matters
Internal linking is the most underused lever in technical SEO, and unlike almost everything else in search it is entirely within your control. No outreach, no auction, no waiting for someone else to decide.
It does three things at once. It passes authority from pages that have earned links to pages that need to rank. It tells search engines which pages belong together, which is how topical clusters register as clusters. And it moves important pages closer to the homepage, since click depth correlates with how readily a page gets crawled and ranked.
The common failure is structural rather than lazy. Sites link generously to blog content and sparingly to the commercial pages that pay for the site, because the blog is where writing happens. The pages that need authority most often receive the least.
The nuance most people miss
Anchor text carries meaning, and "click here" or "read more" wastes it. Describe the destination in the link text, using natural language rather than an exact keyword repeated identically everywhere, which reads as manipulation to both users and search engines. Placement matters too: a link inside body content carries more weight than the same link in a footer that appears on every page, because the footer link says nothing about relevance.
Common mistakes
- Linking generously to blog posts and sparingly to the commercial pages that need authority
- Using "click here" and "read more" instead of describing the destination
- Repeating identical exact-match anchor text sitewide, which reads as manipulation
- Leaving important pages four or more clicks from the homepage