Internal Linking Best Practices to Boost SEO

Why Internal Linking Is SEO Gold

Google doesn’t just crawl your site — it maps it based on what you present to it. Internal links (among other things, like breadcrumbs) tell search engines what’s important on your site page, how your information connects, and where authority should flow. When done conscientiously, they improve topical authority, spread link equity, and keep users engaged longer. You can't ask for better consequences when you operate a site.

Think of your site as a city: your homepage is downtown, pillar pages are main streets, and supporting articles are side roads — internal linking is the road signage that makes navigation possible among the twists and turns.

1. Use Descriptive Anchor Text

I see this mistake more often than I ever imagined I would — "click here" or "in this post." Let's move to a state of enlightenment together — anchor text isn’t just clickable copy...it’s a signal. “non-specific label” means wasted context. Luckily, this is a non-technical and easy fix in most cases: use meaningful descriptors that match search intent. Plain and simple.

• Bad: Click here
• Good: All About Headers

Google’s own SEO documentation emphasizes that anchor text should be descriptive, concise, and relevant—so it clearly signals what the linked page is about. (SEO Link Best Practices – Anchor Text)

2. Flatten Link Depth

If a page takes 5+ clicks to reach from your homepage then you are choosing to orphan it. Keeping important content within 2–3 clicks is best practice, not only because it improves crawl efficiency for those of us with limited budgets, but also because user navigation matters. Great business ideas fail all the time due to a lack of concern for UI.

For example, my Offer Stack article links directly from my business strategy pillar page to keep value concentrated.

3. Build a Pillar and Cluster Model

Internal linking shines most brightly when used in content clusters:

1. The pillar page covers a broad topic in depth
2. Supporting posts target subtopics and long-tail queries
3. Internal body links connect everything back to the pillar

This model strengthens relevance signals and keeps readers in your ecosystem, which is the only metric that matters at the end of the day. Do you have an active, engaged audience or not? For those interested — see how I structured ranking without backlinks with multiple clusters in a successful manner.

4. Technical Best Practices

• I might get some flack for this one: use absolute URLs sparingly; root-relative links (/blog/.../) keep things clean...but Google does prefer absolute links in most cases (it just isn't always practical)
• Audit for broken links with tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
  I’m also planning to release a set of lightweight, self-built tools as open-source to support this process.
• Ensure anchor links are accessible — WCAG recommends descriptive labels for links, at a minimum
• Leverage breadcrumbs (consider breadcrumb schema) for both SEO and UX purposes. Users and Google will thank you for clear navigation to layered resources (example breadcrumb: Home > Blog > Category > Article)

5. Don’t Forget UX

Let's reiterate: Just like your site as a whole, internal links are for humans first. People-first content is synonymous with Google quality standards because they want to reward sites for doing the "right" thing. Scatter too many unrelated links, or worse, omit them, and many of your articles become unreadable to audiences. So, place them where curiosity peaks and readers expect them to be. In this guide you’ve already seen links to Topical Authority, Ranking Without Backlinks, and Offer Stacks — which was deliberate.

UX-driven internal linking helps reduce hard bounces and improves engagement metrics in a very substantial way, which tends to correlate with better organic performance (Search Engine Journal).

Key Takeaways

• Use descriptive anchors that match search intent.
• Keep link depth shallow (2–3 clicks from the homepage).
• Adopt a pillar + cluster content model.
• Audit regularly for broken or orphaned links.
• Balance SEO signals with human readability.

Helpful References

• Google SEO Quality Guidelines
• Search Engine Journal: Internal Links
• Moz: Internal Linking
• Ahrefs: Internal Link Strategies
• SEMrush: Internal Linking