How Pages Should Link to Each Other

What internal links actually do

Three jobs at once, which is why they matter more than their obviousness suggests.

Discovery. A page reachable only by typing its address is difficult to find. Links are the route.

Signalling. A page linked from many places within the site reads as more important than one linked from nowhere. That is a signal you control entirely, unlike links from other sites.

Movement. A visitor who finishes reading needs somewhere to go, and the link you place decides whether that is another page of yours or back to the results.

The orphan problem

The most common structural fault on small sites.

An orphan is a page nothing links to. It usually happens accidentally: a page created for a campaign, an old service page removed from the menu, or something published and never linked.

Those pages are effectively invisible. They may sit in the sitemap and still receive almost no attention, because a sitemap is a suggestion and a link is a route.

Finding them is straightforward with a crawler, which lists pages reachable by following links and lets you compare that against everything the site actually contains. Anything in the second list and not the first is an orphan.

The shape that works

For a small business site, a shallow structure rather than a deep one.

The homepage links to the main service pages. Each service page links to related services and to the relevant area pages. Area pages link back to the services offered there. Articles link to the service pages they relate to.

The working rule is that any page should be reachable from the homepage in about three clicks. Deeper than that and both visitors and crawlers reach it less often.

What that produces is a site where the important pages are linked from many places and the peripheral ones from fewer, which is the signal you want rather than an accident.

Link text

The part that gets least attention and does real work.

The words in the link describe the destination, both to a visitor deciding whether to click and to a search engine working out what the target page covers.

Which means click here, read more, and learn more are wasted. They describe the act of clicking rather than the destination, and repeated across a site they leave every link saying the same thing.

Descriptive text costs nothing: a link reading emergency drain clearing tells both audiences exactly what is on the other end.

The caution is not to make every link identical either. Varying the phrasing naturally reads better and avoids the appearance of manipulation.

Links inside content

Worth distinguishing from navigation.

Menu and footer links appear on every page and are largely ignored as a signal because of it. A link inside the body of a page, placed where it is relevant, carries more weight and gets clicked more.

That is the argument for linking from within your writing rather than relying on the menu. An article about preparing a property for winter that links to your gutter clearing page from the sentence about gutters is doing something the footer cannot.

How many

Fewer than the temptation suggests.

Two to five contextual links on a typical page is a reasonable range for a small business site. Enough to route people, few enough that each one means something.

A page with thirty links in the body dilutes all of them and reads as a directory rather than as writing. A page with none is a dead end.

The pages to link to most

A decision worth making deliberately rather than by habit.

Your main service pages and your contact page, because those are where enquiries come from. Those should be linked from more places than anything else on the site.

What frequently happens instead is that the most-linked pages are the ones easiest to reference, such as an about page or a general blog index, which are not where the business comes from.

The check worth running

1. Crawl the site and list every page reachable by following links.
2. Compare against everything that exists, and note the orphans.
3. Check how many clicks the homepage takes to reach each service page.
4. Look at your link text for anything reading click here or read more.
5. Count what links to your main service pages, which is usually fewer than expected.

That is an hour, once, and it typically finds two or three pages that were invisible and a service page the site barely points at, which for most small business sites is where the structure is failing, and it starts from understanding whether the site is even built to be crawled in the first place as covered in static pages versus a database.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.