Interlinking is the practice of connecting related pages within your website through hyperlinks – essentially creating a web of connections that helps both users and search engines navigate your content more effectively.
This strategic SEO technique distributes page authority throughout your site while guiding visitors deeper into your content ecosystem.
Why Should You Care About Internal Linking?
Strategic internal links create pathways that keep visitors engaged longer, reducing bounce rates while distributing ranking power across all your pages.
Without interlinking, your content exists in isolation – valuable pages remain undiscovered, users leave after one page, and search engines struggle to understand your site’s structure. With proper interlinking, you build a cohesive digital experience that elevates every page’s potential to rank and convert.
How Much Does Interlinking Really Impact SEO?
Studies show that proper interlinking can increase page views by 40% and improve organic traffic by up to 25% within three months.
Research from Ahrefs reveals that pages with strategic internal links rank for 11% more keywords on average – yet surprisingly, 65% of websites have orphaned pages with zero internal links, essentially hiding valuable content from both users and search engines.
What Happens When You Skip Internal Linking?
Neglecting interlinking creates content silos that sabotage your SEO potential at every level. Without internal connections, your high-value pages can’t share authority with newer content, forcing each page to rank solely on its own merit.
Visitors land, find no relevant paths forward, and immediately return to search results – sending negative engagement signals to Google. While competitors weave comprehensive content networks that dominate search results, your isolated pages struggle for visibility. You’re essentially building doors without hallways, wasting the compound effect that makes successful websites unstoppable.
How Do You Build an Effective Internal Linking Strategy?
For SEO best-practices, follow the 9 tips below: *(note: see how “SEO best practices” links to another page? That’s an example of an interlink)*
Tip #1: Add internal links when deemed useful for the user
Example: A blog post talking about the importance of having a content strategy linking to an internal service page on content creation and/or an internal blog post talking about how to create a winning content strategy.
Tip #2: Variation in internal links is always recommended
Example: A blog post talking about the importance of having a content strategy would link to an internal service page on content creation with the Anchor text “content creation” or “this page” or “this service”. If you cannot use keywords within a sentence for the internal links you can always add them as additional reading.
Tip #3: Try not to use more than 6 internal links, and not more than 4 external links per 1,000 word page/post (within the body text).
Note: This is not a “Google rule or guideline”, just my own professional recommendation.
Tip #4. Make sure that you don’t link to broken/404 pages (always double-check the pages you link to)
Note: Linking to a broken page can seriously hurt your rankings.
Tip #5. Link related pages together, don’t just link to any page for the sake of internal linking.
Link to pages that are relevant to the content and/or are for guiding the user to take an action.
Tip #6. Make sure that the pages you want to rank higher in search engines have a greater number of internal links.
Tip #7. Hyperlink actual text, not images.
Note: Images don’t seem to be useful to use as interlinks for either search engine crawlers, nor Google
Tip #8. Internal links in WordPress are defaulted to “follow.”
Don’t change that by manually changing the setting of an internal link to be “nofollow”.
Tip #9. Don’t place an external link before an internal link in an article.
Google weighs the first links they crawl as the most important – no need to give away link power to other sites before your own.