Microsoft Word lets you create hyperlinks by selecting text, pressing Ctrl+K (Windows) or Cmd+K (Mac), then entering a URL or file path in the dialog box. This works fine if you're linking within a document or to external resources, but it's not how you'd handle internal linking for SEO purposes on a live website. When you paste Word content into a content management system like WordPress or Webflow, those hyperlinks usually carry over as absolute URLs if you linked to web pages, but the formatting can break or strip out depending on how you paste (plain text vs. formatted). More importantly, Word has no concept of your site's internal URL structure, so you can't rely on it to generate proper relative links or manage your link architecture. For actual SEO-driven internal linking, you handle it inside your CMS. In WordPress, you highlight anchor text in the block editor, click the link icon, and search for the target post or page by title. This creates a clean relative link and lets you track your internal link graph. In Webflow or custom HTML sites, you'd manually insert anchor tags with relative paths like href="/services/seo-audit" rather than full URLs. At Ottawa SEO, we draft long-form content in Google Docs or Word for client review, but we add internal links only after the content is in the CMS. That way we can see the live URL slugs, verify the target pages exist, and use descriptive anchor text that aligns with the target page's primary keyword. We also avoid over-optimization—two to five contextual internal links per 1,000 words is a safe range, and we never force exact-match anchors if they read unnaturally. If you're writing in Word and want placeholders, use comments or highlight text in yellow to mark where an internal link should go, then add the actual link when you publish. This keeps your workflow clean and ensures your internal link structure supports topical authority rather than just convenience.