Internal linking means placing hyperlinks from one page on your domain to another page on the same domain. When you link from your homepage to a service page, or from a blog post to a related article, that's an internal link. Search engines follow these links to discover content, understand how pages relate to each other, and determine which pages matter most based on how often they're linked to. The mechanics are straightforward but the strategy matters. Every internal link passes a small amount of ranking power (often called link equity or PageRank) to the destination page. Pages that receive more internal links from authoritative pages on your site tend to rank better, assuming the content deserves it. Google also uses anchor text in internal links as a relevance signal, so linking with descriptive phrases like "Ottawa web design services" tells search engines what the target page is about. Internal linking serves three main purposes. First, it helps crawlers find and index your content faster, especially important for new pages or sites with hundreds of URLs. Second, it establishes information hierarchy, showing Google which pages are pillars versus supporting content. Third, it keeps visitors on your site longer by offering relevant next steps, which indirectly supports SEO through engagement metrics. Common mistakes include overlinking (stuffing 20 links into a 300-word post), using generic anchor text like "click here" everywhere, or only linking from navigation menus. At Ottawa SEO, we build internal linking into content planning from the start. When we publish a new blog post, we link to it from 2–4 relevant existing articles and ensure it links out to 3–6 related pages. For competitive keywords, we'll build 8–15 contextual internal links pointing to the target page over time. The difference between sites that rank and sites that don't often comes down to whether they treat internal linking as an afterthought or as deliberate architecture. You're connecting dots for both users and algorithms, so every link should have a reason to exist.