Internal linking for SEO (a simple system that compounds)
A simple internal linking system for SEO, built around your money pages, with anchor text rules, orphan page fixes and a quick audit you can run.
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Short answer
Internal links help Google find your pages and understand what each one is about, and they steer visitors toward the pages that make you money. The simplest system that works is hub and spoke: each money page is a hub, supporting pages link up to it with descriptive anchor text, and every page you care about gets at least one link.
Internal linking for SEO is the cheapest work there is. It costs nothing but attention, it's entirely under your control, and the effect builds every time you publish. It's also the thing most small business sites get wrong, usually by not doing it at all.
This guide covers what internal linking for SEO actually does, a system you can run without special tools, and how to audit what you have.
What internal links do for SEO
They help Google find pages
Google discovers most pages by following links. Its starter guide says the vast majority of new pages Google finds every day are found through links. A page with no links pointing to it may never be found, or found and treated as unimportant.
Google's link guidance puts the rule plainly: "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site."
They tell Google what a page is about
The clickable words of a link, its anchor text, describe the page it points to. When ten of your pages link to your water heater page with words like "water heater replacement," that's a clear signal of what the page covers. Google's guidance says good anchor text is "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant."
They show which pages matter most
The pages you link to most often, from the most relevant places, are the ones you're signaling as important. If your homepage and every blog post link to your "About" page but almost nothing links to your service pages, you're pointing at the wrong things.
They move visitors toward a decision
Someone reading your guide to furnace noises is a good prospect for your furnace repair page. A link at the right moment turns a reader into a lead. This part has nothing to do with Google and is reason enough to do it.
The hub-and-spoke system
Here's the system we use, and it fits on a napkin.
- Hubs are your money pages. Service pages, location pages, product categories. The pages where people contact you or buy.
- Spokes are supporting pages. Guides, FAQs, case studies, blog posts that answer questions related to a hub.
- Every spoke links up to its hub with descriptive anchor text, in the body of the text where it's relevant.
- The hub links out to its best spokes so visitors who need more detail can find it.
- Spokes in the same cluster link to each other where it genuinely helps the reader.
The result is a site where authority and visitors both flow toward the pages that make money. It also makes planning content easier: every new post has to answer "which hub does this support?" If the answer is none, think twice about writing it. We go deeper on planning clusters in our post on topical authority.
Start from your money pages
Before you add a single link, make a short list:
- Your five to fifteen most important pages, usually services and locations
- For each, the main search phrase you want it to rank for
- For each, every existing page on your site that's related to it
Then work backward. For each money page, find three to five related pages that don't link to it yet and add a link in the body text. That one exercise fixes most of the problem on most small business sites.
If you serve several towns, the same logic applies to location pages. They should link to the services offered there, and the services should link to the locations. Our guide to local landing pages covers how to build those pages without making them thin copies of each other.
Anchor text: how to write it
Google's link best practices are short and sensible: be descriptive, keep it concise, avoid generic phrases like "click here," and don't cram keywords in.
| Instead of | Write (for a hypothetical plumber) |
|---|---|
| Click here | Our water heater replacement service |
| Learn more | How we price roof repairs |
| Best cheap plumber Denver emergency 24/7 | Emergency plumbing in Denver |
| This page | Our Naperville office |
Vary your anchors naturally. If every link to a page uses the exact same phrase, it reads like it was written for a machine. "Water heater replacement," "replacing your water heater" and "our water heater installation team" all point clearly to the same page.
Where internal links should go
- In the body text. Contextual links inside a paragraph carry the most meaning for readers and search engines.
- In navigation. Your main menu should reach your most important pages. Keep it focused.
- In breadcrumbs. Useful on larger sites so each page links to its parent.
- In "related" sections. Good for blogs, but hand-picked links beat automatic ones.
- Sparingly in the footer. A huge footer full of keyword links to every city page helps nobody.
How many links is too many? Google says there's "no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain. However, if you think it's too much, then it probably is." We'd add that a link should be one a reader might actually click.
Orphan pages
An orphan page is a page that no other page on your site links to. It might be in your sitemap, but nothing points to it. Orphans are common after redesigns, on landing pages built for old campaigns, and in blogs where posts drop off the paginated archive.
For each orphan, decide: is this a page you care about? If yes, link to it from the hub it belongs to and from one or two related pages. If not, consider redirecting it to a better page or removing it.
An internal linking SEO audit you can do in an afternoon
You can do a useful audit in an afternoon with free tools.
- Check Search Console's Links report. Its internal links section shows your most-linked pages within your own site. Google notes it's a sample, not every link, but it's enough to spot whether your money pages are near the top or buried.
- Crawl the site. A desktop crawler like Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is free for up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites. Sort pages by number of internal links pointing to them.
- Compare the crawl to your sitemap. Pages in the sitemap that the crawler didn't find are likely orphans.
- Check the money pages. Each should have several contextual links from related pages, not only menu links.
- Fix broken and redirected links. Update internal links to point straight at the final URL instead of bouncing through redirects.
Common internal linking mistakes
- Links search engines can't follow. Google says it can only crawl links that are an
<a>element with anhrefattribute. Buttons and menus that rely on JavaScript click handlers without a real link may be invisible to it. - Linking to redirects. After a redesign, old internal links often point to URLs that redirect. Update them.
- Generic anchors everywhere. "Read more" tells nobody anything.
- Every link pointing at the homepage. Your homepage doesn't need help. Your service pages do.
- Forgetting old content. New posts link to old ones, but old posts never get updated to link to new ones.
A routine that compounds
The system only works if it becomes habit. When we publish a new page, we do three things:
- Link from the new page up to its hub, with descriptive anchor text.
- Find two or three older related pages and add a link to the new one.
- Check the hub links out to its best supporting pages, including the new one if it earns it.
That takes ten minutes per page. Over a year of publishing, it builds a site where every new page strengthens the ones around it. That's the compounding part.
What we'd do
If your site has never had attention paid to internal links, we'd start with the money pages exercise above: list them, find related pages, add contextual links. Then fix orphans and redirected links. Then make the three-step routine part of publishing.
If you'd like help building the content that sits around your money pages, our content team plans and writes it with the linking built in from the start.
