Internal linking is when you use HTML anchor elements to link from one page to another within the same website. The basic syntax is <a href="/target-page">anchor text</a>, where the href attribute contains the destination URL and the anchor text is what users click. Here's a real example from a typical service page: <a href="/blog/keyword-research-guide">Learn how to do keyword research</a>. This creates a clickable link with descriptive anchor text pointing to another page on your site. You can use relative URLs (/blog/post-name) or absolute URLs (https://yourdomain.com/blog/post-name), but relative URLs are cleaner for internal links and easier to migrate between staging and production. Internal links serve three purposes. First, they distribute PageRank (link equity) throughout your site, helping important pages rank better. Second, they help Google discover and crawl your content—if a page has zero internal links pointing to it, Google might never find it. Third, they guide users through your conversion funnel, like linking from a blog post about Ottawa web design trends to your actual web design service page. The anchor text matters significantly. Using descriptive, keyword-relevant text like "technical SEO audit services" is better than "click here" because it tells both users and search engines what the destination page is about. Avoid over-optimization though—stuffing exact-match keywords into every internal link looks manipulative. At Ottawa SEO, we typically add 3-5 contextual internal links per blog post, prioritizing links to service pages and high-converting content. For a 500+ domain portfolio, we use a hub-and-spoke model where pillar pages link out to related cluster content, and those cluster pages link back to the pillar. We also audit for orphan pages quarterly—any page with fewer than 2-3 internal links pointing to it is essentially invisible to both users and crawlers. The HTML is simple, but the strategy behind which pages you link to and how often determines whether internal linking actually moves your SEO needle.