Internal links and site structure

What internal links tell a search engine

Two things. Which pages the site considers important: a page linked from the navigation and from many other pages is treated as central, one reachable only from a footer or from nowhere is treated as marginal. And what each page is about: the words used in links to a page are read as a description of it. Google's starter guide, linked below, says both plainly. A site's link structure is therefore not decoration; it is an instruction.

A structure for a local business

The homepage links to every service page, in the navigation and in the body. Each service page links to the two or three related services and to the contact page. District pages, where they exist, link to the services offered in that district and back to the homepage. The about page links to the services. The contact page is in the navigation and in every footer. Blog posts, if any, link to the service page they relate to. Every page is reachable from the homepage in two clicks.

That is the whole structure. A local business site rarely needs more than fifteen to thirty pages, and a structure that a visitor can hold in their head is one a crawler can too.

Anchors

The text of a link says what is on the other end. “Boiler servicing” as the link to the boiler servicing page; not “click here”, not “learn more”, not the same phrase stuffed into every link on the site. Vary the wording naturally between links to the same page. A search engine reads the anchors of internal links as it reads those of external ones, and a page whose incoming anchors all say the same unnatural phrase looks manipulated.

Orphans and dead ends

An orphan is a page nothing links to; a crawler finds it only from the sitemap, if at all. A dead end is a page that links to nothing. Find both with a crawler tool or by listing every page and checking its links. Old pages that nothing links to should be linked, redirected to a relevant page, or removed.

Navigation

The main navigation carries the homepage, the services, the districts if any, about and contact. Not every page; a navigation with forty items tells the search engine that nothing is important. Put the phone number in the header on every page, tappable on mobile. The footer carries the NAP and links to contact, privacy and the main services.

Illustrative example. A roofing firm's site has twenty pages, six of which are old blog posts that nothing links to and two of which are duplicate service pages from a redesign. It redirects the duplicates, links the posts from the relevant service pages, and adds “related services” to each service page. That describes the tidy-up, not an outcome.

Output

A page list showing every page, what links to it, and what it links to, with no orphans and every main page in the navigation. Then the links that come from outside: earning links locally.