Work through this internal linking checklist and you will have covered the part of search optimisation you control most completely. Internal links \u2014 links between pages on your own site \u2014 cost nothing, need no one’s permission, and decide which of your pages search engines find, how well they understand them, and where your site’s authority flows. Most small sites barely use them on purpose. Pages are published, menus are set, and the linking between the actual content is left to chance.<\/p>\n
Internal links do three jobs. Discovery:<\/strong> search engine crawlers move through a site by following links, so a page nothing links to is a page that may be crawled rarely or not indexed at all. Context:<\/strong> the words you link from \u2014 the anchor text \u2014 describe the destination page to the search engine, reinforcing what that page should rank for. Authority flow:<\/strong> links pass ranking signal around a site, so your most-linked, most-visited pages can share their strength with newer or commercially important pages that need it. Readers benefit in parallel: a well-placed internal link is simply the next useful thing to read, which is the standard every item below is written to.<\/p>\n Write the anchor you would want as a reader: specific enough to predict the destination, honest about what is there. Keep anchors in the flow of the sentence rather than appended as a list of links at the end. And treat nav and footer links as structure, not strategy \u2014 the links that carry weight are the contextual ones inside the content, surrounded by relevant text.<\/p>\n The patterns to avoid are the mirror of the checklist: publishing posts that link nowhere; linking every page to the homepage with the same phrase; stuffing links between unrelated pages because the keywords matched; and setting the structure once and never auditing it again. Each is cheap to fix and expensive to leave. Link structure is one of the things examined in our technical SEO audit<\/a>, and keeping it healthy month to month is part of managed SEO<\/a> \u2014 but the checklist above is deliberately written so a site owner can run it in an afternoon, because most of its value is in doing it at all.<\/p>\n There is no correct number. Link where it genuinely helps the reader reach the next useful page, and stop there. A focused post might carry three to five internal links; a long pillar guide will naturally carry more. Relevance is the rule \u2014 links added to reach a quota help nobody, and readers and search engines can both tell.<\/p>\n Yes. Internal links control whether crawlers discover and index your pages at all, they pass ranking signal from stronger pages to weaker ones, and their anchor text tells search engines what the destination page covers. They cannot rescue a page with nothing worth ranking \u2014 but they decide whether good pages get found, understood and credited.<\/p>\n A page with no internal links pointing to it. Readers cannot reach it through the site, and crawlers may only find it via the sitemap or a direct URL visit, so it is crawled less and ranked weaker than it should be. Every important page needs at least one relevant internal link; orphans are the first thing this checklist exists to find.<\/p>\n Run a light check after any publishing push, redesign or URL change, and a fuller audit periodically \u2014 quarterly suits most small sites. Links break and structures drift as a site grows; regular small passes catch orphans and dead links before they accumulate into a visibility problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Use this internal linking checklist to help your pages rank: fix orphan pages, write descriptive anchors, link from strong pages, and clear broken links.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":44,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-seo-copywriting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agreatarchie.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agreatarchie.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agreatarchie.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agreatarchie.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agreatarchie.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agreatarchie.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agreatarchie.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agreatarchie.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agreatarchie.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The internal linking checklist<\/h2>\n
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Anchor text: internal linking best practices<\/h2>\n
Mistakes that waste internal links<\/h2>\n
Frequently asked questions<\/h2>\n
How many internal links should a page have?<\/h3>\n
Do internal links really affect rankings?<\/h3>\n
What is an orphan page?<\/h3>\n
How often should I audit internal links?<\/h3>\n