Internal linking is the only part of SEO you fully control. You cannot choose your backlinks, but you can decide which of your pages point at which others — and that decision changes which pages get crawled, understood and ranked.

Most small sites leave it to chance: a few links in the navigation, a random "related posts" widget, and nothing else. A simple system fixes that in an afternoon.

Start with hubs and spokes

Choose three to six topics you want to be known for. Each becomes a hub page — a substantial guide or service page. Individual articles become spokes that link up to the hub.

  • Hub: "Content writing for ecommerce" — comprehensive, updated, linked from the nav.
  • Spokes: "Product descriptions that convert", "Category page copy", "Writing return policies" — each links to the hub.
  • Hub links down to the best two or three spokes, not all of them.

This structure tells search engines what your site is about and which page is the primary answer for each topic.

New articles rarely rank on their own. The fastest way to give one a start is to add links to it from pages that already have traffic or authority.

  1. Publish the new piece.
  2. Find three existing pages that discuss the same subject.
  3. Add a contextual link inside a relevant sentence — not at the bottom under "read more".
  4. Link back from the new piece to at least one of those pages.

Three good links beat thirty footer links.

Anchor text: descriptive, varied, natural

Anchor text tells search engines what the destination page is about. Use the phrase a reader would expect, and vary it across links:

  • Good: "how to brief a writer", "our article writing service", "a realistic posting schedule"
  • Weak: "click here", "read more", "this page"
  • Over-optimised: the exact same keyword phrase in every link to the same page

Write the sentence first. If the anchor does not fit inside it naturally, the link probably does not belong there.

How many links per page

There is no magic number. A practical guide: two to five contextual internal links in the body of an article, plus navigation. More than that and the reader stops trusting the links.

Every link should answer "why would I click this now?" If the answer is "because we want the ranking", remove it.

Before adding anything, audit what exists. Common problems:

  • Orphan pages — published but linked from nowhere. These are nearly invisible.
  • Links to redirected URLs — slow, and they waste signal.
  • "Related posts" widgets that link by date rather than relevance.
  • Broken links to pages that were deleted without a redirect.

A site crawler will find the first and third in minutes. Fixing them is usually a bigger win than another new article.

Menu links appear on every page, so they carry less weight than a contextual link inside a paragraph. Treat the nav as a map for humans, and use in-body links to guide both readers and crawlers.

A quarterly routine

  1. List your top ten pages by traffic.
  2. For each, check it links to the page you most want to grow.
  3. List pages with no internal links pointing at them.
  4. Add three contextual links from relevant older content.
  5. Update any link pointing to a redirect.

Ninety minutes a quarter is enough to keep the structure healthy.

Internal links are how you tell a search engine which page you want to win.

Every article we deliver includes an internal linking plan for this reason — see the article service for what is included.