Internal linking structure: the free improvement

Aug 29
3 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Introduction

A business publishes steadily for two years and ends up with eighty articles, each written, edited and published on its own. Almost none of them link to each other, and none of them link to the pages that make money.

The result is eighty separate leaflets rather than a body of work. Visitors read one page and leave, search engines find some pages easily and others barely at all, and the service pages get no benefit from any of it. Nothing needs to be written to fix this.

1. Internal linking structure decides what gets found

Understand the mechanism.

Links are how pages are discovered and how importance is inferred. A page linked from ten places within your site is treated as more central than one linked from nowhere, and the second may not be found at all.

2. Link from articles to the pages that sell

The connection most sites are missing.

An article answering a question should link to the service or product it relates to. Publishing useful content that never points anywhere is the single most common waste on small business websites.

3. Use link text that describes the destination

The words carry meaning.

A link reading with the name of the thing being linked to tells both the reader and a search engine what to expect. Repeated instances of click here or read more describe nothing and waste the signal entirely.

4. Link from strong pages to weak ones

Direction matters.

Your most visited and most linked pages have the most to pass on. Adding links from those to newer or underperforming pages moves attention where it is needed, rather than concentrating it further where it already is.

5. Group related content and connect it

Structure beats scattering.

Where several articles cover one subject, link them to each other and to a main page on that subject. A cluster of connected pages performs better than the same pages sitting in isolation, and it keeps readers moving.

6. Keep everything within a few clicks of the home page

Depth buries pages.

A page five levels down is harder to find for both visitors and crawlers. Reviewing how many clicks it takes to reach your important pages, and shortening the path, is often the whole of a navigation problem.

7. Find and fix the pages with no links in

The specific failure worth hunting.

Pages that nothing links to are reachable only by search or by typing the address. Listing them and adding a link from somewhere relevant is a short task with a disproportionate effect.

8. Do not overdo it

More is not better past a point.

A page stuffed with links dilutes each one and reads badly. A handful of genuinely relevant links placed where they help the reader is worth more than thirty inserted mechanically.

9. Add links to older content when you publish

Make it a habit rather than a project.

Each new article is an opportunity to link out to relevant older pages and to add a link to it from two or three of them. Done at publication it takes minutes; done as a retrospective audit it takes weeks.

Review the links after any restructure or migration. Internal links break silently when addresses change, and a site that quietly accumulated forty broken internal links is both harder to crawl and visibly untidy to anybody who clicks one.

Conclusion

Recognise that links determine which pages are found and how important they appear, which makes this the cheapest improvement available.

Link from articles to the service and product pages they relate to, use descriptive link text rather than generic phrases, pass attention from your strongest pages to your weakest, group related articles and connect them to a central page, keep important pages within a few clicks of the home page, hunt down pages with no inbound links at all, avoid stuffing pages with links, and add the links at the moment you publish rather than leaving it for an audit.