Internal Linking for Small Sites: A Practical Plan

Internal links are links from one page on your website to another page on the same site. They're easy to overlook, because they don't feel like "SEO". But they do three important jobs:

1. Help visitors find related information and the next step, for example from a guide to the product it's about.
2. Help search engines discover pages. Crawlers find most pages by following links. A page that no other page links to, an "orphan page", may never be found, even if it's in your sitemap.
3. Show what matters. Pages that many others link to look important, and the words in each link tell search engines what the target page is about.

Unlike links from other websites, internal links are completely in your control. On a small site they're one of the few things you can improve this afternoon.

Types of internal links

• Navigation: the main menu, header and footer. Every page gets these, so reserve them for your most important pages.
• Breadcrumbs: "Home / Sarees / Banarasi" at the top of a page. They show the structure and give an easy way back up.
• Contextual links: links inside the text. These are the most useful for readers and search engines, because the surrounding sentence explains the connection.
• Related content: "You might also like" sections at the end of a post or product.

Anchor text

The anchor text is the clickable words. It should describe the page it links to:

• Good: "see the guide to canonical tags and redirects"
• Weak: "to learn more, click here"

Descriptive anchors help screen reader users too, because they often jump from link to link and hear only the link text. Vary the wording naturally. You don't need the exact keyword every time, and repeating it word for word in every link looks forced.

A plan for a small site

1. Decide your most important pages

Usually the home page, the main service or product category pages, and the contact page. These belong in the main menu and should get the most links.

2. Link down from categories, and up from details

A category page links to each product or service in it. Each product or service page links back to its category and to two or three closely related items.

3. Connect guides to the pages that earn money

Every guide should link to at least one relevant service, product or tool page, wherever it genuinely helps the reader. A guide on how to identify pure silk naturally links to your silk saree collection. A guide on waterproofing costs links to the waterproofing service page.

4. Link new pages from old ones

When you publish something new, find two or three existing pages on related topics and add a link to the new page. Google often finds a new page faster this way than by waiting for the sitemap.

5. Find and fix orphan pages

Compare the pages in your sitemap with your menus and content. Any page that nothing links to needs at least one link, or should be removed if it isn't useful.

How Rankdesk links its own pages

Rankdesk has two kinds of page, tools and guides, and the links are planned so each kind leads to the other:

• Every tool page has a sidebar with all the other tools, plus up to three guides about that tool. The SEO audit page links to the audit checklist, for example.
• Every guide has breadcrumbs to its category, links in the text to related guides, a box at the end linking to the tool that does the job, and three related guides below.
• Audit results link each problem to the tool that writes the fix.

When I ran Rankdesk's own audit on one guide, it counted 64 links: 61 internal and 3 external. That sounds like a lot, but most are the menu, the footer and the related guides, and every one leads somewhere useful.

When I merged Rankdesk's older short guides into longer ones, the old addresses got 301 redirects. I also changed every internal link to point straight at the new address rather than relying on the redirects. Redirects keep old bookmarks and outside links working, but your own links should never need one.

How many links per page?

There's no fixed number. Add links where they help the reader. A long guide might have ten links in its text, while a short product page might have three. What to avoid is a block of dozens of links that serve no reader, such as a footer listing every city you've ever worked in.

Common mistakes

• Links only in the menu, with none inside the content.
• Broken links after renaming or deleting pages.
• Links to redirected addresses, such as old URLs or http:// versions. Update them to the final address.
• Image links without alt text, which leaves the link with no description.
• nofollow on internal links. It's rarely needed and can stop crawlers following paths you want found.
• Important pages buried five clicks deep. Anything that matters should be reachable within about three clicks of the home page.

A 30-minute internal linking session

1. List your five most important pages.
2. For each one, search your own site for pages that mention its topic. On Google, site:yourdomain.com waterproofing finds them.
3. Add a link from each relevant mention, using descriptive words.
4. Check your newest page has at least two links pointing to it.
5. Run the pages you changed through an audit to confirm the links work.

Check your links

The Rankdesk SEO audit counts internal and external links on any page and flags links with no readable text. For a whole-site view, the free version of Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 addresses and shows pages with few links pointing to them. The guide for small businesses lists more free tools.