Internal links, suggested as you write.

What internal links do

An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another. Your menu and footer are full of them, but the ones that matter most for SEO are the links inside your content: a sentence in a guide that points to a related guide, or a product description that links to the matching care instructions.

Internal links do three jobs at once. They help visitors find the next useful page. They help search engines discover pages, because crawlers find new URLs by following links. And they signal importance: a page that many of your other pages link to looks more central to your site than one that nothing links to. Search engines also use the words in the link, the anchor text, as a clue to what the linked page is about.

Of all the things you can do for SEO, internal linking is one of the few that’s entirely in your control, costs nothing and can be improved today. Rilea SEO is designed to make it part of how you write rather than a separate chore.

Link suggestions while you write

As you write in the editor, Rilea SEO suggests related posts and pages you could link to, based on your keyphrases and the words in your content. Cornerstone content is ranked higher in those suggestions, so your most important pages are more likely to be linked from new posts.

The suggestions are a starting point, not an instruction. Rilea SEO never adds links automatically. You read the list, pick the pages that genuinely help a reader at that point in the text, and add the links where they fit naturally.

The link counter

Rilea SEO counts three kinds of links for every post, and shows them in the posts list so you can scan them quickly:

• Internal links from this post to other pages on your site
• External links from this post to other sites
• Incoming links from other posts on your site to this one

The incoming count is the most revealing. A cornerstone guide with two incoming links isn’t getting the support it should. A post with 40 incoming links but no traffic may be getting links it doesn’t deserve, or targeting the wrong search.

Orphaned content

An orphaned page is a published page that no other post or page links to. It can still be found through your sitemap, your site search or a menu, but within your content it’s cut off. Search engines tend to see orphaned pages as less important, and visitors rarely find them.

Orphans are surprisingly common. A post published in a rush, a landing page made for a campaign, an older article that lost its only link in a rewrite: they all end up stranded. Rilea SEO’s orphaned content report, under Rilea SEO, then Link Insights, lists every published page with no incoming internal links, and suggests posts that could link to each one.

For each orphan, decide whether it’s worth keeping. If it is, add two or three links to it from related posts. If it isn’t, consider merging it into a better page and redirecting the old URL, or removing it.

Cornerstone content and topic clusters

The most effective internal linking follows a simple structure. Pick a handful of cornerstone pages: comprehensive guides on the main topics your site covers. Around each one, write more specific posts that go deeper into parts of the topic. Then link them together:

• Each specific post links to its cornerstone page.
• The cornerstone page links out to the specific posts.
• Specific posts link to each other where they genuinely relate.

This is often called a topic cluster. It helps search engines understand which page is the main resource for a topic, and it gives visitors a clear path from overview to detail and back.

Mark cornerstone pages in the Rilea SEO panel. That raises their word-count target in the content analysis and boosts them in link suggestions, so the structure reinforces itself as you write.

Writing good anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. Good anchor text tells the reader, and search engines, what they’ll find on the other side.

• Be descriptive. “Our guide to choosing running shoes” is better than “click here” or “this post”.
• Vary it naturally. You don’t need the exact keyphrase every time you link to a page. Natural variations read better and still help.
• Keep it short. A few words is usually enough. Linking a whole sentence is harder to scan.
• Match the destination. If the anchor promises something the page doesn’t deliver, readers leave quickly.

How many links, and where

There’s no magic number. A useful rule of thumb is to link wherever a reader might reasonably want to know more, and to avoid linking just to add links. In a typical 1,500-word article, a handful of contextual internal links is normal, plus a link back to the cornerstone page.

Links within the main body of the content, especially early on, tend to be more useful to readers than links tucked away at the bottom. “Related posts” lists at the end are fine, but they’re not a substitute for links placed where they make sense in the text.

External links

Linking out to other sites isn’t a loss. Linking to a useful source, an official document or a tool you mention helps readers and shows your content is connected to the wider web. Rilea SEO counts external links alongside internal ones, and the content analysis notes when a post has none.

If you prefer, Rilea SEO can add nofollow to external links in your content and open them in a new tab, from Rilea SEO, then Settings, then General. Use nofollow for links you don’t want to vouch for, such as paid or user-submitted links. For ordinary editorial links to trustworthy sources, a normal link is fine.

An internal linking routine

Internal linking works best as a habit rather than a project. A simple routine:

1. When you publish, use the link suggestions to add links from the new post to related pages, and link to your cornerstone page for that topic.
2. Straight after publishing, open two or three older related posts and add a link to the new one, so it isn’t orphaned from day one.
3. Once a month, open the orphaned content report and fix anything new on the list.
4. Every few months, review the incoming link counts for your cornerstone pages and make sure they’re getting the support they need.

Common mistakes

• Linking only from the menu. Navigation links help, but contextual links in your content carry more meaning.
• Using the same anchor everywhere. Repeating an exact phrase across dozens of links looks unnatural.
• Linking to redirected or broken URLs. Update internal links when you move a page, so they point straight to the final URL.
• Ignoring old content. New posts get attention; older posts often have the authority. Linking from established posts to new ones helps the new ones get found.
• Burying cornerstone pages. If your most important guide is three clicks from the homepage and rarely linked, it’s harder for search engines to see it as important.

Internal links on Shopify

Rilea SEO for Shopify includes primary collections for products, which shape breadcrumbs and the links between products and their categories. Link suggestions, a link counter and an orphaned content report for Shopify are planned for a later release, and will be free like the rest of the app.

Internal linking for different kinds of site

Blogs

Blogs grow quickly and older posts drift out of view. Build clusters around your main topics, link every new post to its cluster’s cornerstone page, and go back to older posts regularly to add links to newer ones. Category pages help too, but contextual links do more.

Online stores

On a store, the most valuable internal links usually run from guides and blog posts to category and product pages. A buying guide that links to the right category, or a care guide that links to the products it covers, helps shoppers and passes relevance to the pages that make sales. Linking related products to each other where it genuinely helps, such as a case to the phone it fits, works well too.

Local and service businesses

Service businesses often have a page per service and a page per location. Link each service page to the locations where you offer it and each location page to its services, so search engines see the full picture of what you do and where.

Documentation and knowledge bases

Help content benefits from links between related articles and back to a hub page for each topic. Readers who arrive on one article from search can then find the next step without going back to the search results.

Measuring the effect

Internal linking improvements don’t usually show up overnight, but they can be measured:

• Incoming link counts. In Rilea SEO’s Link Insights, watch the incoming counts for your cornerstone pages rise as you link to them.
• Orphan count. The orphaned content report should shrink and stay small.
• Indexing. In Google Search Console’s Pages report, pages that were “Discovered, currently not indexed” sometimes become indexed after they gain internal links.
• Rankings and clicks. Over the following weeks, look at the Performance report in Search Console for the pages you’ve strengthened, especially cornerstone pages and pages that were previously orphaned.

Internal links after a redesign

Redesigns are when internal links break most often. Menus change, old category pages disappear and URLs move. Rilea SEO’s automatic 301s keep old links working, but links that go through a redirect are slower and less clear than direct ones. After a redesign, run the orphaned content report to find pages that lost their links, and check your most important posts for internal links that now point to redirected URLs. Update those links to the new addresses, and make sure each cornerstone page is still linked from the homepage or main navigation as well as from related posts.