Internal links: the cheapest SEO win you are leaving on the table
A page nothing links to barely exists for a search engine. With internal links you tell Google which page matters and what it is about, without spending a cent.
New to this topic? Start with SEO for small businesses: ranking higher in Google without an agency
The problem nobody sees
You write a good page, put it online and wait. Not much happens. Often that is not down to the text, but to the fact that nothing points to it.
A search engine discovers pages by following links. A page that only sits in your sitemap may get found, but gets no signal that it matters. A page that five other pages link to with clear text does.
Internal links are the only SEO signal entirely in your own hands. You do not need another website for it, no budget and no months of patience. Just an hour and a bit of order.
What an internal link does
A link from one page on your site to another does three things at once:
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | A search engine follows the link and finds the page faster |
| Importance | Pages with many incoming links are seen as more important |
| Meaning | The anchor text tells what the target page is about |
That last one is forgotten most often. "Click here" or "read more" says nothing. "Our explanation of hybrid heat pumps" says exactly what the page is about, and that helps both Google and the visitor.
Build from overview to detail
The strongest structure is simple. For each topic you have one overview page, and below it the pages that each cover one sub-question.
- The overview page links to every detail page
- Every detail page links back to the overview
- Detail pages that logically follow each other link to each other
An overview page like that is often called a pillar, and the detail pages together a cluster. This blog works exactly that way: every category has one main article that the other articles point to. Which topics belong in a cluster, you decide with keyword research.
The effect is that the overview page collects the authority of the whole topic, while each detail page can rank for its own narrow question.
Where you place links
Not every link carries the same weight. A link in the middle of the running text, in a sentence about the topic, says more than a footer link that appears on every page.
A few places that work well:
- In the opening paragraphs, where you mention a concept that is covered in depth elsewhere
- At a next step, such as "how to go about this is explained in..."
- In a block at the bottom with related articles, as an addition and not as the only place
What you are better off skipping: ten links in one paragraph, or the same page linked three times from the same page. It adds nothing and reads badly.
Find the pages without incoming links
On almost every site that has been around for a few years, there are pages that nothing points to. They are called orphan pages. They were written once, linked from a news item that has since disappeared, and forgotten ever since.
Those come first. A good page that gets no links at all is the easiest win there is: you do not have to rewrite it, only connect it.
You find them by putting your sitemap next to a crawl of your site. Anything that is in the sitemap but cannot be reached through a single link is an orphan page.
Anchor text: descriptive, but not forced
There is an overcorrection: exactly the same keyword as anchor text everywhere. It looks unnatural and does not help.
Write the anchor text the way you would say it in a conversation. Vary it, as long as the topic stays clear:
| Less good | Better |
|---|---|
| Click here | How to request a quote |
| Read more | The checklist for an SEO audit |
| heat pump eindhoven heat pump eindhoven | Installing heat pumps in the Eindhoven area |
Keep it up as your site grows
Internal links are not a job you do once. Every new page deserves links from existing pages, and that is easy to forget. After a year of writing you have twenty new articles, half of which are linked from nowhere.
So make it a fixed step. For every new page: which two or three existing pages are about something related, and where does a link fit?
An example from practice
Take an installation company with a page about heat pumps, five blog articles about subsidies, noise, maintenance, costs and older houses, and a contact page.
Without structure, each article only links to the contact page. Google sees five loose pieces that happen to be about the same thing. With structure, the heat pump page links to all five articles, each article links back, and the article about costs points to the one about subsidies. Now Google sees one topic this company knows a lot about, with one page that sums it up.
Not a single word of text was added. Only the connections changed.
How dGENIX helps
The SEO Engine crawls up to a hundred pages of your site and shows what goes wrong technically and in the content. That is the starting point to see which pages stand isolated.
The Authority Engine goes a step further. For a topic it builds the whole setup: one main article with the pieces around it that all point to it, and puts them in your CMS as drafts. You review and publish.
Want a quick check of what is missing right now? Use the SEO audit checklist. The broader story is in SEO for small businesses.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal links should a page have?
There is no fixed number. A thousand-word article with three to five relevant links to related pages is a good measure. More important is that every key page has at least a few incoming links.
Do links in the menu and footer count?
Yes, but they carry less weight than links in the running text, because they are the same on every page. They help discoverability, less so in telling what a page is about.
Can I place too many internal links?
Only if they make the text unreadable or lead nowhere useful. As long as every link helps the reader answer a next question, you are fine.
