Internal linking: lift a page using the pages you already have
A page that stalls rarely needs another article. It needs three links from pages you already published.
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You have a decent page, on a topic you know well, and it will not move. The reflex is to write one more article. That is usually the wrong move: Google judges a page partly on what the rest of your site says about it, and if none of your other pages cite it, you are asking it to fight alone.
Internal linking is deciding which pages on your site point to which. It costs nothing to produce, the effect shows within weeks, and most sites leave this lever completely untouched.
Step 1: know what your target page is fighting for
Before looking for who should link, settle on one keyword for the page you want to lift.
Take its title and URL slug, and write the query as a single phrase. Not three, one. If you hesitate between two wordings, the page itself is hesitating, and no link will fix that.
Step 2: find the pages already covering the topic
In Google, type:
site:your-domain.com [general topic]
Not your target page's exact keyword: the topic. For a target of "internal linking", search "SEO links", not "internal linking". You want neighbouring pages, not competing ones.
Keep the first 5 to 10 results. Those are your candidate source pages.
A source page is only useful if it is already indexed. A link from a page Google cannot see transmits nothing.
Step 3: check what already exists
Open each source page and look for three things:
- Does a link to your target page already exist?
- If so, what is its anchor text?
- Where does the link sit in the page?
This is the step everyone skips, and it is the one that saves time. Half the work is often already done, with an anchor to fix rather than a link to create.
A link whose anchor is "click here" or "read more" tells Google nothing about the page receiving it. Fixing it takes ten seconds and is often worth more than one more link.
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Step 4: write the anchor
The anchor is the clickable text. It is what tells Google what the destination page is about.
- Use the target keyword, or a close, natural variant.
- Put the link inside a paragraph, where the topic is genuinely discussed. A footer link is worth far less than one in running text.
- Do not use the same anchor everywhere. Three links with the exact same text read as a template, not a recommendation.
The mistakes that cancel the gain
- Linking from unrelated pages just to add volume - Putting twenty internal links on one page: each one counts for less - Using "click here" as the anchor
- Linking to a page that is
noindexor blocked inrobots.txt- Redoing the whole linking structure at once, with no way to measure what worked
What you should see, and when
A fixed linking structure does not show the next day. Count two to four weeks for Google to recrawl the source pages.
The signal to watch is not average position, too noisy. It is the number of impressions for the target page in Search Console. They rise before positions do.
