Internal Linking for SEO: A Simple Guide
If you've ever published a great blog post and never linked to it again, you've made the single most common internal linking mistake there is: writing an orphan. Internal linking gets treated like an SEO nice-to-have, but it's one of the few ranking factors that's entirely inside your control — no algorithm update, no ad spend, just a decision about which pages point to which. 💖
What most businesses get wrong
- Linking only at publish time — new posts get a few links, then nobody goes back to update older pages ever again.
- Generic anchor text — "click here" and "read more" tell Google, and the reader, nothing about what's on the other end.
- Forgetting the money pages — blog posts that never link to the services or contact page they're meant to support.
- Orphan pages — services, locations or old posts that nothing on the site links to, so they're nearly invisible to Google and to visitors.
- Linking for the sake of it — five links to the homepage doesn't help; two or three relevant, well-placed links does.
The three-link checklist
Steal this and run it on every page you publish, then retrofit it onto your older posts. It isn't complicated — it's just something almost nobody does consistently.
Three real examples
Notice each one links sideways to related content and forward to a page that actually makes money — that's the part most businesses skip. 📈
How link equity actually flows
Search engines treat your homepage and your most-linked pages as your most "trusted" pages, and some of that trust passes through every link you place. That means a well-established page linking down to a newer or underperforming one can genuinely help it along — which is why going back and adding links from your best posts is often more useful than obsessing over brand-new ones.
Mistakes that quietly waste your internal links
- Keyword-stuffed anchor text — "Gold Coast family lawyer Gold Coast solicitor" reads as spam to readers and to Google.
- Letting old posts rot — with zero links pointing to the newer, more relevant content that's replaced them.
- Linking to the homepage by default — instead of the specific page that actually answers the question.
- Broken internal links — an easy, invisible leak left behind after a page is renamed or removed.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal links should a blog post have?
There's no magic number, but three to five relevant, natural links is a solid range for an 800–1000 word post — enough to help navigation and pass some authority, without feeling stuffed.
Does internal linking actually affect rankings?
Not directly the way backlinks do, but it affects two things Google cares about a lot: how easily your pages can be crawled and found, and how long people stick around once they land. Both feed into rankings indirectly, and reliably.
What anchor text should I use?
Descriptive, natural phrases that tell the reader — and Google — what's on the other end, like "our family mediation service" rather than "click here" or the same exact-match keyword every single time. Vary it naturally across links to the same page.
Do I need a tool to manage internal links?
Not to start. A simple spreadsheet of your key pages and what links where gets you most of the way, and Google Search Console's Links report is free and shows exactly which pages currently have the fewest internal links pointing in. 🌴
Keep reading 🤍
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