Why does it work?
Google discovers and understands your website by following links. Three direct consequences:
- A page with no incoming internal link is an orphan page: hard to discover, judged unimportant. It happens more often than you would think, especially to service pages created and then left out of the menu.
- Links pass along authority. Your homepage concentrates the site's strength; the pages it links to inherit it. Internal linking is the distribution circuit for that strength.
- Anchor text carries meaning. A link reading "our custom windows" pointing to the windows page tells Google, better than any tag, what the target page is about. Generative AI engines use the same logic to navigate and connect your content.
And unlike external backlinks, internal linking depends on nobody else: you control 100% of it.
The hub and child pages method
Organize each major topic of your business in a star pattern:
- One hub page per major topic, presenting the whole subject and listing its subtopics. For a carpenter: a "Windows" page covering materials, product lines and installation.
- Specific child pages, one per subtopic: "PVC windows", "Wooden windows", "Price of a custom window". Each one answers a specific query.
- Links in both directions: the hub links to each child, each child links back to the hub, and closely related children link to each other when it feels natural.
This blog applies exactly that structure: the articles cite each other and point back to the pillar pages. This page is a living example, just look at the links in this article.
How do you write a good anchor?
The anchor is the clickable text of the link. Three rules: descriptive ("our structured data guide" rather than "click here"), varied (not the same exact anchor repeated ten times, that smells artificial), and honest (the anchor announces what the target page really contains). Permanently ban "click here", "learn more" and "read more" as standalone anchors: they carry no meaning at all.
How many links per page?
No magic number, but a healthy order of magnitude for a small-business website: 3 to 8 contextual internal links in the body of a page, on top of the menu. Below that, the page is isolated; far above it, each link gets diluted. The decision criterion is always the same: does this link help a real reader continue their journey? If yes, it helps your SEO too.
Mistakes to avoid
- Linking everything to everything. A footer with 40 links to every page structures nothing: useful internal linking lives in the content, not in the areas repeated on every page.
- Orphan pages. After every new page, ask yourself: who links to it? If the answer is "nobody", the job is not done.
- Broken links. A deleted page leaves dead links that waste crawl budget and annoy visitors. Hunt them down twice a year.
- Linking only to the homepage. It is the page that needs it least. Send the strength to the pages that are fighting for rankings: services, products, guides.
Our free audit measures the internal linking of your analyzed pages in the on-page SEO category, and the full report lists the fixes page by page.