Internal linking: the free thing most small sites skip

What internal links do

Two things. They help search engines find pages, and they pass a share of a page's standing to whatever it links to.

Your homepage is almost always your strongest page, because it collects most of the external links a small site gets. A page linked from nowhere but the sitemap gets none of that benefit, however good it is.

They also keep readers moving. Someone who arrived on a blog post and then clicked through to a service page is a great deal closer to buying than someone who read one page and left.

Find the pages nothing links to

Pages with no internal links pointing at them are called orphan pages, and nearly every site over about thirty pages has some.

They are usually pages added outside the normal flow. A landing page for a campaign that ended. A service added later that never made it into the menu. An old post that scrolled off the blog index years ago.

A crawl finds these quickly by comparing what is linked from your homepage against what is in your sitemap. Anything in the sitemap that the crawl never reached is orphaned, and it is often surprising how much sits in that gap.

Link from strong pages to the ones that need help

The useful direction is from pages that already do well to pages you want to do better.

Find your five most-visited pages in Search Console. On each, add two or three links, inside the body text rather than in a sidebar, pointing at pages you are trying to push. A busy guide linking through to the service page it relates to is worth more than any number of footer links.

Keep it natural. Three contextual links in a page of real writing is plenty. Twenty crammed in reads like spam to a person and gets treated accordingly.

Anchor text should describe the destination

The clickable words tell search engines what the target page is about. "Click here" and "read more" say nothing.

Use a short description of the destination instead. "Our boiler servicing page" or "how we price emergency callouts" both tell a reader and a crawler what they will get.

Do not use the exact same phrase for every link to a page. Vary it the way you naturally would in writing, and it will be fine.

• Good: a phrase describing what the linked page covers.
• Fine: the page title, more or less.
• Weak: "click here", "this page", a bare URL.
• Harmful: the same keyword-stuffed phrase on every single link.

Group related pages so they support each other

If you have several pages on connected subjects, link them to each other rather than leaving each one isolated.

The usual shape is one broader page covering a subject, with more specific pages beneath it, each linking up to the broad one and across to its siblings. Search engines read that structure as a signal that you cover the area properly rather than in passing.

The guides on this site work that way. This one connects to refreshing old pages and why you are not ranking because the three are genuinely related, and a reader finishing one often wants another.

Keep the depth shallow while the site is small. Every page should be reachable from the homepage in about three clicks. Once a page sits five or six levels down, both crawlers and people struggle to find it, and burying something that deep is usually a sign the structure needs flattening rather than more links bolted on.

An hour, once, then whenever you publish

Set aside an hour. List your pages, find the orphans, add links from your strongest pages to your most important ones, and fix any anchor text that says "click here".

After that it becomes a habit rather than a task. Every time you publish something, add two links out to existing pages and one link in from an older page. That is the whole maintenance job.

It costs nothing, it needs nobody's approval, and it is the single most common thing missing from small sites we look at. If you want the orphans found for you, that is one of the checks, and you can join the beta to try it.