Internal linking does two jobs: it tells search engines which of your pages matter, and it carries authority from pages that have it to pages that need it. Both are entirely within your control.
The rules that matter
Descriptive anchor text
"Click here" tells nothing. "How much to spend on Meta Ads" tells everything. The anchor is a label for the destination — use the words you want that page to rank for, without repeating the exact same phrase everywhere.
Link from strong pages to important ones
Your homepage and your best-performing articles have the most authority. Every commercial page should be linked from at least one of them.
Three clicks maximum
Anything reachable only in five clicks reads as unimportant. Flatten the structure.
No orphans
A page nothing links to will not rank, whatever is in the sitemap. Check for these when you publish anything new.
A sitemap tells Google a page exists. Internal links tell it the page matters.
The internal linking structure that works
- Commercial pages — service and location pages. These are the destinations.
- Supporting content — articles answering questions around each service, each linking up to its commercial page.
- Cross-links between related articles, so readers and crawlers move sideways too.
Mistakes
- Footer blocks of forty links. A doorway signal that dilutes every page.
- The same anchor text everywhere. Vary it naturally.
- Linking every mention. Three to six meaningful links in an article beats twenty.
Want your internal structure audited?
Auditing what you have
You cannot fix a link structure you have not counted. The quickest honest audit is to crawl your own site and count inbound internal links per URL. Free crawlers handle a few hundred pages without paying anything.
What you are looking for is the shape of the distribution. A healthy site has its commercial pages near the top of the list. The common unhealthy pattern is that the privacy policy and the blog index have hundreds of inbound links, because they sit in the footer, while the page that actually sells something has four.
We audited this site and found exactly that: one of our three service pages had two internal links pointing at it from a hundred-page site. The fix took an afternoon and moved it to over a hundred. Nothing about the page itself changed.
Where the links should come from
| Link source | Strength | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Body of a relevant article | Strongest | Your most important commercial pages |
| Homepage | Strong | Top three or four money pages |
| Main navigation | Strong but limited | Categories, not individual pages |
| Footer | Weak per link, sitewide reach | Ensuring nothing is orphaned |
| "Related posts" blocks | Moderate | Keeping articles connected to each other |
A contextual link inside a paragraph, surrounded by relevant text, carries more than the same link repeated in a footer on every page. Both are worth having; only one is worth writing carefully.
Anchor text without over-optimising
Use the words you want the destination to rank for, but vary them. Fifty internal links all reading "performance marketing agency" looks engineered, because it is. Mix the exact phrase with natural variations and partial matches — "how we run paid campaigns", "our performance marketing work", "what this costs" — so the pattern reads like writing rather than like a spreadsheet.
The one rule that never bends: the anchor must make sense to a reader who cannot see where it goes. If your link text is "click here" or "this page", a screen reader user gets nothing and neither does a crawler.
A maintenance habit
Every time you publish, do two things before you close the editor. Link the new page from at least two existing pages that are genuinely related, and link out from the new page to two or three of your own pages. Two minutes each time prevents the slow accumulation of orphans that otherwise takes a full audit to undo.
Questions people ask
Why does internal linking matter?
It is the one ranking input entirely within your control. Links from your own pages signal which pages you consider important and pass authority to them, and they cost nothing but the decision about where to point them.
How many internal links should a page have?
Enough that every important page is reachable, few enough that each one means something. A page with three deliberate contextual links in the body outperforms one with thirty in a block at the bottom.
What anchor text should I use?
Descriptive and varied: words that tell the reader what they will get. Repeating the same exact-match phrase on every link looks engineered, and "click here" wastes the signal entirely.
What is an orphan page?
A page nothing links to internally. Search engines find it through the sitemap at best and often will not index it at all. Orphans are the most common reason a published page never appears in search.