Internal Linking Best Practices for SEO

: Internal links — links from one page on your site to another — help search engines discover new pages, understand your site’s structure, and distribute ranking authority (“link equity”) across your content.

Why internal linking matters: A page with no internal links pointing to it (an “orphan page”) is harder for both users and search engines to find, no matter how good the content is. Meanwhile, pages that receive links from many other relevant pages tend to be seen as more important within your site’s overall structure.

Best practices: - Use descriptive anchor text. Instead of “click here,” use text that describes the destination page’s topic — this helps both users and search engines understand context. - Link from high-authority pages to priority pages. Your homepage and top-performing content typically pass the most link equity — use that to support pages you want to rank. - Keep important pages within a few clicks of the homepage. Pages buried five or six clicks deep are crawled less frequently and seen as less important. - Avoid orphan pages. Regularly audit for pages with zero internal links pointing to them — these are effectively invisible to your site’s own link structure. - Don’t over-optimize anchor text. Repeating the exact same keyword-stuffed anchor text across dozens of links can look manipulative rather than natural.

A simple, high-impact habit: whenever you publish new content, go back and add a few contextual links to it from older, relevant, already-indexed pages — this speeds up discovery and indexing significantly.