Internal Linking: The Cheapest SEO Lever
By CodexierPublished 5 min read
Most SEO work costs money: content, links from other sites, technical fixes. Internal links cost only time, and they are entirely under your control. They decide which pages search engines find, how they understand what each page is about, and where the authority your site has earned flows. Yet on most small business sites, the pages that sell are the ones with the fewest links. This guide shows how to fix that.
Why internal links matter
Internal links do three jobs. They are how crawlers discover pages: a page with no links pointing to it may never be found or may be crawled rarely. They are a signal of importance: pages linked from many places, especially from strong pages, are treated as more important. And the anchor text tells search engines what the target page is about. All three are within your control and cost nothing but editing time.
From strong pages to key pages
Every site has a few pages that attract most of the external links and traffic — often the home page, a popular guide or a well-known case. And every business has a few pages that earn money: service pages, product categories, the booking page. The job is to connect the first group to the second. Use Search Console to find which pages get the most impressions and links, and check whether they link to your key pages at all.
- List your five to ten most important commercial pages
- In Search Console, find the pages with the most impressions and external links
- Check which of the strong pages link to the commercial ones
- Add a relevant in-text link where it helps the reader
- Link related guides to each other and to the matching service page
Relevance is the rule. A link from a guide about bathroom renovation to your bathroom renovation service page makes sense to the reader and to Google. A link from the same guide to your accounting services does not. Our guide to Search Console for beginners shows where to find the link reports.
Descriptive anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. It should tell the reader where the link leads, which also tells search engines what the target is about. ”Click here” and ”read more” say nothing. Describe the target in natural words and vary the phrasing a little — exact-match keywords in every link look unnatural.
| Weak anchor | Better anchor |
|---|---|
| Click here | our fixed-price bathroom renovations |
| Read more | how we handle ROT deductions |
| This page | what a new company website costs |
| Services | accounting for sole traders |
Descriptive links also help screen reader users, who often navigate by listing all links on a page.
Finding orphaned pages
An orphaned page has no internal links pointing to it. It exists in your CMS, maybe in your sitemap, but no visitor can reach it by clicking. Orphans are common after redesigns, campaigns and old blog posts. Find them by comparing a crawl of your site, made with a tool such as Screaming Frog, with your sitemap and your analytics: pages in the sitemap or with traffic that the crawler never reached are orphans.
Link it
If the page is useful, link it from relevant pages and, if important, from the navigation.
Merge it
If it overlaps another page, merge the content and 301-redirect the old address.
Remove it
If it has no value, remove it and redirect any address that has external links.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal links should a page have?
As many as help the reader. There is no fixed number; a long guide may have many, a short service page a few. Links that do not help the reader do not help SEO either.
Do footer links count?
They help crawling and structure, but links in the main content carry more contextual weight. Do not rely on the footer alone for important pages.
Should internal links open in a new tab?
Generally no. Opening internal links in the same tab is what visitors expect, and it is better for accessibility.
How often should I review internal links?
Whenever you publish something important, and with a full crawl once or twice a year or after any redesign or migration.
Are your key pages hard to find?
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