An internal linking plan you can reuse

Many sites link to their pages only from the menu, then wonder why a good page gets no visits. Internal links are the one kind of link you fully control, and a simple plan is enough to use them well. This lesson gives you that plan in four steps, with a worked example for a small site.

What internal links do

An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another page on the same site. Menu and footer links count, but this lesson is about links inside the text of your pages, because those are the ones most sites forget.

Internal links do three jobs:

• They help discovery. Search engines find pages by following links. That process is called crawling, and I explain it in crawling and indexing, explained simply. A page that nothing links to is hard to find, for Google and for people.
• They show which pages matter. A page that many of your pages link to looks more important than one linked once from an old post.
• They help the reader. A good link answers the next question before the reader has to search for it.

The second job is why I call them votes. A link from another site, called a backlink, is a vote you have to earn. An internal link is a vote you can cast yourself, today.

Every page you care about should be one obvious click away from a page people already visit.

The plan in four steps

Step 1: list your important pages

Write down the five to ten pages that matter most to your business: your main services or products, your best guides, your contact or booking page. These are the targets. Everything else in the plan exists to send links to them.

Step 2: find pages that mention the topic

For each target, find other pages on your site that already talk about its topic. Use your site's own search, or type this into Google, with your own domain and topic:

site:example.com roof repair

Each page in that list is a candidate. It already mentions the topic, so a link there will feel natural.

Step 3: link with descriptive anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable words of a link. It tells the reader, and Google, what is on the other side. In the example below, the words in square brackets are the link.

"Click here" says nothing about the target. "Guide to roof repair costs" describes it. Keep the wording natural and vary it a little from page to page. Do not use the same anchor text for two different target pages, because that sends a mixed signal about which page is about what.

Step 4: fix orphan pages

An orphan page is a page that no other page links to. It may be listed in your XML sitemap and still be an orphan. For each one, choose: link to it from at least one relevant page, or decide the site does not need it and remove it.

How many links is enough

There is no correct number, and I would be careful with anyone who gives you one. These are the guidelines I work with:

• Each important page gets links from at least three other relevant pages, not counting the menu.
• Each new article links to two or three related pages. Then go back and add a link to the new article from one or two older ones. This second half is the part people skip.
• One link per target is usually enough. Linking to the same page five times in one article does not help the reader.
• Link where it helps. If every sentence has a link, none of them stands out.

A quick test: read the sentence with the link in it. If a reader would want to know more at that exact point, the link belongs there.

A worked example for a small site

Take a roofing company with a homepage, four service pages (roof repair, roof replacement, roof inspection, gutter cleaning), a contact page and eight blog posts.

Step 1. The targets are the roof repair, roof replacement and roof inspection pages.

Step 2. A site search shows that four blog posts mention these services without linking to them.

Step 3. The owner adds these links:

From: How to spot a roof leak          To: Roof repair        Anchor: roof repair service
From: How long does a roof last        To: Roof replacement   Anchor: roof replacement options
From: Preparing your roof for winter   To: Roof inspection    Anchor: book a roof inspection
From: What a new roof costs            To: Roof replacement   Anchor: our roof replacement process
From: Roof repair                      To: How to spot a roof leak   Anchor: signs of a roof leak

Note the last line. Links should run in both directions: from articles to service pages, and from service pages to the articles that answer common questions.

Step 4. One blog post about storm damage has no links pointing to it. It gets a link from the roof repair page and one from the winter article.

That is about an hour of work. Keep the list in a spreadsheet and repeat steps 2 and 3 every time you publish something new.

Internal linking is the last lesson of four in the On-Page SEO series. If you want to keep going, links and sitemaps work together, and XML sitemaps: what to include and what to leave out covers the other half.

Check your own site

• Can you name your five most important pages?
• Does each one have links from at least three other relevant pages, not counting the menu?
• Do your links describe the target, or do they say "click here" and "read more"?
• Is there any page that no other page links to?

Run the free audit on one of your important pages to see how it is doing overall.