Linking Between Your Own Pages

The part you actually control

Most of what affects where you appear in search results is outside your hands. You cannot decide who links to you, what competitors publish, or how a search engine weighs anything.

Internal links are the exception. You decide every one of them, they cost nothing, and they can be added in the ten seconds it takes to write a sentence.

Which makes it strange that a typical small business site has links in the navigation, links in the footer, and almost none inside the pages themselves.

What they do

Three things, and only one is about search engines.

They tell a reader where to go next, at the moment they want to know more, which is the most useful time to offer it.

They show a crawler how your pages relate, which pages you consider important, and what each one is about, since the wording of a link describes the destination.

And they distribute whatever authority the site has, so a page nothing links to is a page you have quietly told everybody not to bother with.

The pages that never get linked

Predictable, and they are frequently the ones that matter.

Deep service pages, three levels down, reachable only from a menu.

Individual question pages, which get written and then never referenced from anywhere.

Older posts, which are linked to nothing because everything published since forgot they existed.

And the page you most want people to reach, which is often linked less than your privacy policy, since that at least appears in the footer of every page.

Write the link into the sentence

The wording matters, and it is where most sites give up the benefit.

A link reading click here, read more, or this page describes nothing. Both a reader and a crawler learn only that something exists.

A link reading what a heat pump costs to run tells both exactly what is on the other side.

Write the sentence naturally and let the descriptive part carry the link, rather than appending a bare instruction at the end.

How many, and where

• Two or three per page is plenty for most business pages.
• Inside the text, where the subject comes up.
• Pointing to related pages, not always to the contact page.
• Backwards to older material, which is what needs the help.
• Varying the wording, rather than repeating one phrase everywhere.

A page with forty internal links reads as a directory and dilutes the value of each. A page with none is an island.

Do it while writing

This is the whole difference between sites that do this and sites that intend to.

As a separate project, internal linking is tedious, it is nobody's favourite afternoon, and it gets scheduled and rescheduled.

Written in as you go, it costs nothing. When a draft mentions something you have covered elsewhere, link it in the moment.

The habit compounds quietly. Twenty pages written this way produce a connected site without anybody ever having done a linking exercise.

A worked example

A veterinary practice had forty-one pages and eleven internal links in total, all of which pointed at the appointment booking page.

Their advice pages, which were genuinely good, were reachable only through a menu and received almost no visits.

Over two afternoons they added links inside the text of the twelve most-visited pages, pointing to related advice, using descriptive wording.

Roughly thirty links, all of them from busy pages to quiet ones.

Visits to the advice section rose several times over within two months, mostly from people already on the site rather than from search.

Over the following six months some of those pages began appearing in search results for the first time, having previously been effectively invisible to a crawler that could reach them only by menu.

Link backwards, mostly

A useful default: point at older pages more often than newer ones.

New pages get attention automatically. They are on the front of the section, they are linked from wherever new material is listed, and whoever wrote them is thinking about them.

Older pages have none of that and are usually where the accumulated value sits.

There is also a practical reason on a site published over time: a link from a newer page to an older one always works, while the reverse requires going back and editing something you had finished with.

Fixing an existing site

If you already have a site with no internal links, the efficient version is not to work through every page.

Take your ten most-visited pages, which you can list in a minute, and add two or three links from each to pages you want people to reach.

That is thirty links from your strongest pages, which is where they do the most work, and it is an afternoon.

Then leave the rest to the habit, adding links as pages get written or updated.

The counter-case

Internal linking is easy to overdo, and the overdone version is recognisable.

Pages where every second sentence is a link read as a maze and interrupt the reading, which loses more than the links gain.

Linking the same phrase to the same page from a hundred places is a pattern that looks deliberate rather than natural, and it is not what a well-organised site produces by accident.

And links inserted where a reader would not want them, because a page needed a link rather than because the connection was real, are noticeable and slightly insulting.

The test is whether you would have written the link if search engines did not exist. If yes, keep it. If no, it is decoration.

The habit

1. Link two or three times per page, inside the text.
2. Describe the destination in the wording.
3. Point mostly backwards, to older pages.
4. Add them while writing, not as a project.
5. Start with your ten busiest pages if fixing an existing site.
6. Check occasionally that none of them are broken.

Nothing here takes longer than a minute at a time, which is the reason it works.

Link wording is covered in links that all say read more.

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.