A few months ago we audited a local services website with about 60 pages. The owner had written a dozen genuinely good blog posts, and almost none of them ranked. When we crawled the site, the reason was embarrassingly simple: most of those posts had zero internal links pointing to them. They existed, but nothing on the site said “this one matters.”
Internal linking is one of the few SEO levers you fully control, and it costs nothing. It’s also one of the most neglected. Here’s how we approach it for clients, in plain terms.
What internal links actually do
An internal link is any link from one page on your site to another page on the same site. They do three jobs at once.
First, they help search engines discover pages. Google’s own documentation says it finds new pages largely by following links from pages it already knows about. A page with no links pointing to it (an “orphan page”) can be missed or crawled rarely.
Second, they pass context. The words you use as link text give search engines a hint about what the destination page covers. Google’s guidance on links specifically recommends descriptive anchor text so both users and crawlers understand where a link leads.
Third, they help people. A visitor reading about website security might genuinely want your maintenance checklist next. A good internal link is simply a useful signpost.
Start with a simple site structure
Before adding a single link, sketch how your content is organized. For most small business sites, a “hub and spoke” layout works well:
- Hub pages are your main service or topic pages, such as “Web Design Services” or “SEO Services.”
- Spoke pages are the supporting articles and detail pages, such as a blog post on landing page mistakes or a case study.
Each spoke should link up to its hub, and the hub should link out to its most useful spokes. Spokes on related topics can link sideways to each other. That’s the whole model. You don’t need a diagram with arrows going everywhere.
One practical rule: try to keep every important page within three clicks of the homepage. If a service page takes five clicks to reach, it’s probably buried.
Write anchor text like a human
Anchor text is the clickable part of a link. Compare these two sentences:
- “To learn more, click here.”
- “We cover this in more detail in our guide to fixing slow page speed.”
The second tells both readers and search engines what’s on the other side. Aim for short, natural phrases that describe the destination. Avoid two extremes: vague text like “read more,” and stuffing the exact same keyword phrase into every link. Repeating an identical, keyword-heavy anchor dozens of times looks forced, and it reads that way too. Vary the wording the way you would in normal writing.
A practical workflow you can finish in an afternoon
Here’s the process we’d use on a typical 50 to 100 page site.
1. List your priority pages
Pick the five to ten pages that matter most to the business: your core services, your highest-converting landing pages, and your best evergreen articles. These are the pages you want to receive the most internal links.
2. Find orphan and weakly linked pages
Crawl your site with a tool like Screaming Frog (the free version handles up to 500 URLs) and sort by “Inlinks.” Anything with zero or one inlink is a candidate. Google Search Console’s Links report also shows your top internally linked pages, which is a quick sanity check on whether your most-linked pages are the ones you actually care about.
3. Add links where they’re genuinely useful
Open your priority pages, then search your site for relevant mentions. In WordPress, searching your post content for a keyword shows you where it’s already discussed. Wherever a related page is mentioned in passing, turn that mention into a link. Two to five contextual links per 1,000 words is a sensible starting range, though there’s no magic number. Let the content decide.
4. Fix the basics
While you’re in there, repair broken internal links (they return 404 errors) and update links that point to old, redirected URLs. Linking directly to the final URL is cleaner and saves a redirect hop.
5. Make it a habit
Every time you publish something new, link to it from two or three existing pages and link from it to relevant older ones. This single habit prevents most orphan page problems before they start.
Common mistakes we see
Relying only on the navigation menu. Menu links help, but contextual links inside body content carry more specific meaning. A menu can’t explain why one page relates to another.
Linking everything to everything. If every page has 100 links, none of them stands out. Be selective. A link should earn its place.
Burying links in JavaScript-only elements. Google recommends standard HTML links using an <a href> tag so crawlers can follow them reliably. Buttons that trigger scripts without a real URL can be missed.
Forgetting mobile. Check that the links you add are easy to tap on a phone and don’t sit awkwardly close together. More than half of web traffic for many local businesses now comes from mobile devices.
Quick answers
How many internal links should a page have?
There’s no official limit or target. Add as many as are useful to a reader, and no more. For a typical 1,000-word article, a handful of relevant links is plenty.
Should internal links open in a new tab?
Generally no. Internal links work best in the same tab, since visitors are staying within your site. Save new tabs for external references if you use them at all.
Do internal links use “nofollow”?
Almost never. You want search engines to follow your own links, so leave the default behavior alone.
What to expect (honestly)
Better internal linking often helps pages get found and understood more reliably, and it usually improves how visitors move through a site. But it’s one factor among many. No agency, including ours, can promise a particular ranking or traffic increase from any single change, and anyone who does is overselling. Make the changes, measure with Search Console over a few months, and keep what works.
If you’d rather have someone audit your site structure and fix the gaps, that’s something we do regularly for businesses of all sizes. The Technowave Global Solutions team is happy to take a look.
Written by the team at Technowave Global Solutions, a web design, development, and SEO agency based in Ludhiana, India, working with clients since 2010. Last updated October 2026.