Internal linking strategy: how to link your pages for SEO

Internal links do three jobs. They help search engines discover pages, since Google finds most new URLs by following links from pages it already knows. They help it understand pages, because the anchor text and surrounding words describe the destination. And they show importance: a page linked from the home page, the main menu and dozens of articles sends a clearer signal than one buried five clicks deep.

Google's link best practices put it simply: make sure every page you care about has a link from at least one other page on your site. Unlike backlinks, internal links are entirely in your control, which makes them one of the cheapest SEO improvements available.

Google can reliably follow a link only when it is an anchor element with an href attribute pointing to a real URL. Links created by JavaScript click handlers without an href, or buttons that change the page through script, may not be followed. Check important templates with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and confirm the links appear in the rendered HTML.

There is no need to add nofollow to internal links. It does not save crawl budget on a normal-sized site and can stop signals reaching pages you want to rank.

1. Identify your money pages. The service, product and category pages that bring enquiries or sales. These should receive the most internal links.
2. Group content into topic clusters. Create a hub page for each main topic and link it to every supporting guide or post on that topic. Each supporting page links back to the hub and, where useful, to its neighbours.
3. Link from guides to services. Informational articles attract visitors and links. A contextual link from each relevant article to the matching service page passes that attention on.
4. Use descriptive anchor text. Describe the destination in a few words, for example 'local SEO for Dubai businesses', rather than 'click here'.
5. Place links in the body copy. Links inside a relevant paragraph give more context than a long list in the footer.
6. Keep important pages shallow. Anything that matters should be reachable within about three clicks of the home page.
7. Review every quarter. When you publish a new page, add links to it from two or three existing related pages, not just from the blog index.

Google's guidance asks for anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it links to. Avoid generic phrases such as 'read more' on their own, and avoid stuffing the same exact keyword into every link, which reads badly and adds nothing. Natural variation is fine: 'web design for ecommerce', 'our Shopify builds' and 'online shop design' can all point to the same page.

An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it. Google may still find it through the sitemap, but it receives no internal signals and visitors cannot reach it. To find orphans, crawl the site with a tool such as Screaming Frog, export the list of URLs found by following links, then compare it with your XML sitemap and the pages in your analytics. Anything in the sitemap but not in the crawl is an orphan.

Fix each one by linking it from its topic hub and from the most relevant existing articles, or by redirecting it to a better page if it no longer earns its place. The Links report in Search Console also shows which pages receive the most internal links, which is a quick way to check that your priorities match your linking.

Our own guides follow the hub model. The SEO guides hub links to every SEO guide, each guide links back to it and across to related topics such as what a backlink is, and every guide points to the SEO service where it is relevant. The result is that every guide can be reached from its hub, from related guides and from the service it supports, and none of them is left as an orphan.