An internal link is a link from one page on your website to another page on the same website. The link in your menu that goes to "Contact", the "related products" row on a product page, and a link inside a blog post that points to your pricing page are all internal links.
They look ordinary, but they decide two important things: which pages visitors find next, and which pages search engines think matter most on your site.
What an internal link looks like in HTML
Here is a simple internal link inside a sentence:
<p>Before you buy, <a href="/pages/size-guide">check our size guide</a>.</p>The part between the tags, "check our size guide", is the anchor text. It tells both the reader and Google what they will find on the other side. The href is the address of the page you're linking to. Because it starts with a slash, it points to a page on the same domain.
Internal links vs external links
| Internal link | External link | |
|---|---|---|
| Points to | A page on your own domain | A page on a different domain |
| You control | Both pages and the anchor text | Only the page the link sits on |
| Main SEO job | Spreads authority and context across your site | Cites sources, builds trust |
Why internal links matter for SEO
Search engines discover pages by following links. Once they find a page, the links pointing to it help them judge how important it is and what it's about. Internal linking helps in three ways:
- Discovery. A page with no internal links pointing to it (an orphan page) is hard for Google to find, even if it is in your sitemap.
- Authority. Pages that many other pages link to are treated as more important. Linking from strong pages, like your home page or a popular blog post, passes some of that strength along.
- Context. Descriptive anchor text such as "almond nutrition facts" tells Google what the target page covers far better than "click here".
Navigation links vs contextual links
Not all internal links carry the same weight. Menus, footers and sidebars repeat on every page, so search engines treat them as site structure. Contextual links, the ones written inside the main content of a page, are usually the strongest signal because they are surrounded by relevant text.
That's why a site can have hundreds of links on every page and still have pages that are, for practical purposes, orphans: nothing inside the content ever points to them.
Common internal linking mistakes
- Orphan pages. New products and old blog posts that nothing links to.
- Generic anchor text. "Read more", "click here" and "this page" waste the chance to describe the target.
- Broken internal links. Links to pages that were deleted or moved, which return a 404 error.
- Links to redirects. Every redirect adds a hop. Link straight to the final URL.
- Everything links to the home page, nothing links deeper. Your most valuable pages are usually two or three levels down.
How to add better internal links
A simple routine works for most sites:
- List the pages you most want to rank, such as collections, services or key guides.
- Find other pages on your site that talk about the same topic.
- In those pages, find a sentence that already mentions the topic and turn the relevant words into a link.
- Use anchor text that describes the target page, and vary it naturally.
- Re-check after publishing to confirm nothing is broken and every important page has contextual links pointing to it.
Doing this by hand is fine for a 20-page site. For a store or blog with hundreds of pages, finding the right sentence on the right page is where most of the time goes.
Finding internal link opportunities automatically
LinkBrainly crawls your site, finds orphan pages, broken internal links and weak anchors, and then writes each missing link for you: the page to edit, the exact sentence to use and the words to link. The free audit covers your latest 200 pages.
Try it on your own site. Run a free AI internal link audit and download the full report as one Excel file.
Frequently asked questions
What is an internal link in SEO?
An internal link is a hyperlink from one page on a website to another page on the same domain. In SEO it helps search engines discover pages, understand what they are about, and decide which pages are most important.
How many internal links should a page have?
There is no fixed number. Aim for enough contextual links that every important page is reachable from related content, usually a few links per 1,000 words, each with descriptive anchor text.
What is an orphan page?
An orphan page is a page that no other page on the site links to from its main content. Search engines may crawl it rarely or treat it as unimportant.