Digital marketing glossary

What is internal linking in SEO?

Written and reviewed by L.K. Monu Borkala · Updated 10 November 2026

Definition

Internal linking means adding links from one page of your website to another page on the same website. Internal links help visitors move to related information, help search engines discover and understand your pages, and show which pages are most important.

How it works

Search engines find new pages mostly by following links, so a page with no internal links pointing to it (an orphan page) may be crawled rarely or not at all. The words you link with, the anchor text, tell people and search engines what the target page is about, so 'root canal treatment cost' is far more useful than 'click here'. Pages that receive many internal links from strong, relevant pages are treated as more important. Good practice is to link naturally within the text where it helps the reader, keep important pages within a few clicks of the home page, link from popular pages to new ones, and fix broken internal links quickly.

Example

Picture a coaching institute in Kota that publishes a new page, 'JEE Main 2026 Crash Course'. For weeks it gets no traffic, because nothing links to it. The team adds links to it from the home page, the JEE syllabus guide, the fees page and three popular blog posts, each with clear anchor text like 'JEE Main crash course'. Google finds and indexes the page within days, and students reach it from the blog posts.

An illustration: the business and the rupee figures are made up to show how the idea works.

Common mistake

Using the same vague anchor text, like 'read more', everywhere, or stuffing dozens of links into a footer instead of linking where they help the reader. Another mistake is linking to pages that redirect or no longer exist.