The Internal Linking Strategy Checklist: What to Verify Before You Publish

Run through this before you consider internal linking strategy actually done:

1. Link from your highest-authority pages (usually the homepage and top organic-traffic pages) down to newer or underperforming content that needs a boost.
2. Use descriptive, varied anchor text instead of generic 'click here' — anchor text is a relevance signal for the linked page's topic.
3. Add contextual links within body content, not just navigation — in-content links carry more topical relevance signal than boilerplate menu links.
4. Revisit old, high-traffic posts periodically to add links to newer related content — this is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-effort SEO habits.
5. Double-check this after any site migration or major redesign, not just at launch.

None of these individually take long. The value is in doing all of them, every time, instead of remembering most of them most of the time.

Pair this with the broken links (404 errors) checklist if you're doing a fuller pre-launch pass.

Internal Link Suggestion Tool runs through most of this automatically.

Everything in this guide runs directly in your browser — no signup, no install.