Internal link

An internal link connects two pages within the same website, for example from a blog post to a services page or from your homepage to your contact page. Whereas an external link points to another domain, an internal link stays within your own site. It seems like a detail, but together your internal links determine how visitors and search engines move through your website.

Your internal links are effectively your site's road network. Pages that many roads lead to appear important. Pages that no link points to are hard to find, for people and for crawlers alike. The good news: internal links are entirely in your own hands. Unlike links from other websites, you don't have to wait for anyone to add or improve them.

What do internal links do for your visibility?

Internal links have three important functions:

• Discovery: search engines find new pages mainly by following links. A page without internal links, known as an orphan page, can be hard to find or found late.
• Context: the anchor text and the surrounding sentence tell Google what the target page is about.
• Importance: pages that are linked often and from relevant pages probably carry more weight within your site. Google has long used links as a signal, although it doesn't disclose exactly how much weight internal links carry.

An example: a law firm in Manchester

A law firm has dozens of blog posts about divorce, tenancy law and inheritance law, but none of them link to the services pages. Visitors read an article and leave again. By linking from each article, at a natural point, to the relevant services page, and from that services page back to the most important background articles, a coherent whole emerges for each area of law. That is in effect a content cluster, with the services page at its centre.

How to approach internal links

1. Identify your most important pages: services, categories and guides you want to rank.
2. Make sure every important page can be reached from several relevant pages, not just from the menu.
3. Use descriptive anchor text such as "our approach to tenancy disputes" instead of "click here".
4. Place the most important links in the body text, where they get context, not just in the footer.
5. Link to the final URL, not to an address that redirects first.
6. Check regularly for broken links and orphan pages.

Common mistakes

Overdoing it is a first pitfall: dozens of links in one paragraph make a text unreadable and dilute the message. A second is different pages linking to different targets with the same anchor text, which can contribute to keyword cannibalisation. And a third is hiding links in scripts or buttons that crawlers don't recognise as ordinary links.

Internal links and AI search

AI systems that search the web follow links to find pages, just like traditional crawlers. A clear internal structure helps them understand which pages cover a topic together and which page gives the most complete answer. That is no guarantee of a mention, but a coherent site does make your expertise easier to read. A technical SEO analysis of your internal link structure shows which pages get too few links and where links are broken.