How do you create an internal link?

Short answer

Find a sentence on one of your pages that already talks about the page you want to support, select the words that describe it, and link them to that page’s final URL. In WordPress or Shopify that is the link button in the editor. The skill is not the mechanics. It is choosing the right source page, the right sentence and the right words.

Mechanically, an internal link is the simplest thing in SEO. A few seconds in any editor. What makes one link useful and another one pointless is everything around the click: which page it comes from, which sentence it sits in, what the clickable words say, and where it points.

The mechanics

In HTML, an internal link looks like this: <a href="/local-seo">local SEO for clinics</a>. The href is the destination. The text between the tags is the anchor text, which is what the reader sees and clicks.

In WordPress’s block editor, highlight the words, press the link button or Ctrl+K, and either paste the URL or start typing the page title to search your own site. In Shopify, the rich text editor on pages, products, collections and blog posts has the same link button. Most other platforms work the same way.

Google’s guidance is that it can generally crawl links only when they are an anchor element with an href attribute. Editor link buttons produce exactly that. Problems come from buttons and menus built with scripts, not from links added in the editor.

Step 1: choose the page you want to support

Start from the destination, not the source. Which page do you want to rank better? Usually a service page, category, location page or a key guide. Those are the pages that should receive the most links, and on most sites they receive the fewest.

Step 2: find pages that already talk about it

Search your own site for the subject. A site: search in Google, or the search in your CMS, will turn up posts and pages that mention it. The best source pages are relevant to the topic and already get some traffic or links of their own, because they have more to pass on.

Step 3: pick the sentence

The link should sit in a sentence that is already about the destination, so a reader would naturally want to click. If no sentence fits, it is fine to add one, as long as it genuinely helps the reader. Avoid tacking a “related: see our services” line onto the end of every post; it reads as boilerplate and carries little meaning.

Step 4: choose the anchor text

Use words that describe what the destination is about, ideally the words people search for. Google says good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant. “How we handle insurance claims for roof repairs” tells Google and the reader far more than “click here”.

The best source for those words is your own data. In Search Console, filter the performance report to the destination page and look at the queries it already earns impressions for. Use those phrases, varied naturally across different links.

Step 5: link to the final URL

Use the exact live address, not one that redirects. On my own site, which drops trailing slashes, I found forty header and footer links written with slashes, each firing a redirect on every page view. Small, invisible, and repeated thousands of times. I wrote it up in the redirects nobody sees, including the forty on my own site.

Mistakes that make links useless

Vague anchors. “Read more”, “here”, “this article”. The HTTP Archive found 13.4% of pages fail the descriptive link text check.
The same exact anchor everywhere. Fifty links all saying “best personal injury lawyer Denver” reads as manipulation. Vary it as a person would.
Linking to the wrong page. If two pages could answer the query, decide which should win and point every anchor at that one.
Burying links in footers and sidebars. They work, but they say less than a link in the body text.
Linking only from new posts. Older pages usually have more authority. Go back and add links from them.

How many to add

As many as the copy will carry without reading like a directory. On most pages that is several more than currently exist. On a 300-page site, a proper pass usually adds two to four hundred placements.

After you add them

Google has to recrawl the source pages before the new links count, which usually happens within a couple of weeks for pages that get regular traffic. Ranking movement on the pages receiving the links tends to show between four and twelve weeks later, and it usually shows in impressions before clicks. Keep a simple list of what you added and when, and check impressions on the target pages a month later. If nothing has moved after three months, look at the target page itself; links point at pages, they do not improve them.

If you want the placements chosen for you, sentence by sentence, my internal linking service delivers a sheet with the source page, target, anchor and the sentence it belongs in, or places the links for you.