Internal Links for SEO: How to Use Them Properly

On this page

1. What these links do
2. Make sure the links can be followed
3. Write link text that makes sense
4. Where to put them
5. A quick way to check your own site
6. Want your site’s links sorted?
7. Frequently asked questions

Internal links are links from one page of your website to another page on the same site. They are one of the simplest things to get right, and one of the most often forgotten.

This guide covers what they do, how Google treats them and how to write them. Everything here comes from Google’s own advice on links, so you can check it yourself on Google’s link best practices page.

What these links do

They do two jobs:

1. They help visitors. A good link takes someone from a page that raised a question to the page that answers it.
2. They help Google find pages. Google follows links to discover pages. Google says every page you care about should have at least one internal link from another page on your site.

A page with no links pointing to it is easy to miss. If you have ever wondered why a page is not showing, our guide on what to do when your website is not showing on Google lists this as one of the things to check.

Make sure the links can be followed

Google says it can generally only crawl a link if it is an `<a>` element with an `href` attribute. You will not see this when you edit a page, but it matters if your site is built with custom code. Google gives examples that work and ones that do not:

• Works: `<a href=“/seo”>SEO</a>`
• Not recommended: a link with an `onclick` but no `href`, or a `<span>` that only looks like a link.

If your menu or buttons are built in an unusual way, ask your developer to confirm they use real links. Any page that only appears after clicking a button that is not a real link may never be found.

Write link text that makes sense

The visible words of a link are called anchor text. Google’s advice is that anchor text should be descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both the page it is on and the page it points to.

• Avoid generic text such as “click here” or “read more”. Google suggests describing the destination instead, so “list of cheese types” rather than “click here”.
• Keep it short. A long sentence made into a link is harder to understand than a few well-chosen words.
• Read it out of context. If the link text only makes sense with the sentence around it, rewrite it.
• Do not stuff keywords. Google says keyword stuffing is a violation of its spam policies. One natural link is better than ten repeated ones.
• Do not chain links together. A run of single-word links is hard to read. Space them out in the sentence.
• Image links need alt text. Google uses an image’s alt text as its anchor text, so describe where it goes.

Where to put them

There is no ideal number. Google says that if you think it is too many, it probably is. Instead, link where it helps the reader:

• From blog posts to the service page they relate to, such as from a post about how to rank higher on Google to our SEO service.
• From a service page to the guides that answer common questions about it.
• From one guide to another where the reader will want to go next, for example from what SEO is to Search Console errors explained.
• From your homepage and menu to the pages that matter most to your business.
• Between local pages and the main service page, for example local SEO.

A quick way to check your own site

1. Write down your five most important pages.
2. Open each one and ask: how many other pages link here?
3. If the answer is none or one, add links from pages where it would help a reader.
4. In Google Search Console, the URL Inspection tool shows how Google sees a page. Our guide on Search Console errors explains the messages you may see.

Want your site’s links sorted?

We look at how your pages link together as part of our SEO service, and fix gaps that stop visitors or Google finding the pages that matter. Try our free website check and tell us about your site.

Google’s link guidance checked against its Search Central page on 22 October 2026. Google changes its guidance over time, so check its page if something looks different.

Frequently asked questions