Glossary /On-page & content
Internal Linking
Links between pages on the same site, which drive discovery, spread ranking signals, and tell an engine what a page is about.
Internal links do three jobs at once. They give crawlers paths to pages they would not otherwise find, they move accumulated authority from well-linked pages to weaker ones, and their anchor text describes the destination in the site’s own words.
It is the most controllable lever in SEO and the most neglected. Every other authority signal depends on someone else acting; internal links are entirely yours, cost nothing, and can be added to a page that already ranks in order to lift one that does not.
The pattern that works is contextual links inside body copy pointing at genuinely related pages, rather than a footer block of every URL on the site. Links inside content carry more weight, and a link that a reader might plausibly click is the one an engine treats as a real endorsement.