Internal linking is one of the few SEO levers you have complete control over — no algorithm update changes it, no competitor can undo it, and it costs nothing but time. It’s also one of the most commonly ignored, because unlike a title tag it doesn’t live in one obvious field in your SEO plugin.
What internal links actually do
They pass authority between pages on your own site, they tell search engines which pages you consider important based on how many links point to them, and they help crawlers discover new content faster. A page with zero internal links pointing to it — an "orphan" page — can take far longer to get indexed, if it gets indexed at all.
Start by identifying your priority pages
Before adding links anywhere, decide which pages you actually want to rank: your pricing page, your best cornerstone guides, your highest-value category pages. These are the pages that should be receiving the most internal links, not just the homepage.
Link from old content to new content
Whenever you publish something new, go back through three to five older, already-indexed posts on a related topic and add a contextual link to the new page. This is the single most effective internal linking habit, because it gives the new page a path to be discovered from pages Google already trusts.
Use descriptive anchor text
"Click here" tells a search engine nothing about the destination page. "Our WordPress SEO audit checklist" tells it exactly what to expect. Vary the anchor text naturally across different links to the same page rather than repeating one exact phrase everywhere, which can look manipulative.
Don’t rely on the navigation menu alone
A link in the header or footer nav is weak signal compared to a contextual link inside body content, because every single page on the site carries the same nav links — it doesn’t distinguish one page’s relevance from another’s. Contextual, in-content links are what actually differentiate importance.
Fix orphan pages
Run a crawl of your own site and compare it against your sitemap: any URL that exists but receives zero internal links from anywhere else is an orphan. These are usually old posts, forgotten landing pages, or pages a redesign left behind. Add at least two or three contextual links to each one from related content.
Watch for broken internal links
Every internal link pointing to a page that’s since been deleted, moved, or renamed wastes crawl budget and passes zero value. A basic crawl of your own site — which is also step four of our full audit checklist — will surface these.
The free audit maps your internal linking automatically — including orphan pages and broken internal links — so you don’t have to crawl your own site by hand.
Map your internal links for freeInternal linking pairs naturally with fixing thin content, since a page that’s worth linking to needs to actually earn that link — see turning thin pages into ranking pages.