An internal linking strategy is a set of rules for which pages on your site link to which, and with what anchor text, so visitors and search engines reach your most important pages easily and understand how they relate.
By Kristijan GjorgjioskiIndependent SEO consultantPublished 18 October 2026 · 10 min read
Most sites don't have an internal linking strategy. They have whatever links happened.
Here's a strategy that works for service businesses and online shops. You'll learn:
An internal linking strategy is the set of rules deciding which pages link to which, from where on the page, and with what anchor text.
It matters for two reasons.
First, people. Links are how a visitor moves from "I'm reading about this" to "I want this". A missing link is a dead end.
Second, search engines. Google's link best practices say Google uses links to judge relevance and to find new pages to crawl.
The same page puts the minimum plainly: "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site."
A link's value to your structure depends on where it sits:
| Position | What it's good for | Limitation |
|---|---|---|
| Header menu | Making key sections reachable from everywhere | Says a page matters, not how it relates |
| Footer | Locations, policies, full service lists | Repeated everywhere, mostly skimmed |
| Sidebar | Related content on blogs and shops | Often template-driven and generic |
| Breadcrumbs | Showing hierarchy | Only links upwards |
| Body copy | Context: why this page relates to that one | Only exists if someone writes it |
Body links do the work most sites skip.
When I audit a site, the gap I find most often is a money page that's in the menu and the footer but never linked from inside the copy.
Don't start by adding links. Start by deciding what each page is for.
A crawler sees URLs. A strategy needs roles.
Here are the roles I use:
| Role | Typical examples | Should link to | Should be linked from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service | "Boiler repair", "Bookkeeping" | Related services, industries, locations, proof | Home, hub, guides, industries, locations |
| Industry | "Bookkeeping for dentists" | The services that industry buys | Services it applies to |
| Location | "Plumber in Leeds" | Services offered in that area | Service pages, location hub, footer |
| Hub | "All services", "Locations" | Every page in its group | Main menu |
| Category or collection | "Men's running shoes" | Subcategories, products, sibling categories | Parent category, menu, guides |
| Product | A single item | Its category, related products | Category, guides, related products |
| Guide | Blog posts, how-tos | The service or category it supports | Hub, related guides, the page it supports |
Once every page has a role, the missing links stop being a matter of opinion.
A service page with no links to its industries is a gap.
A location page with no incoming links is an orphan.
You can list both, and you can count them.
Tip: do the labelling in a spreadsheet, one row per URL. It becomes the input for every step below.
Service sites earn their leads on three page types: services, industries and locations.
Your job is to connect them in both directions.
If you sell bookkeeping to dentists, the bookkeeping page should mention dentists and link to that industry page.
The industry page should link back to every service a dentist would buy from you.
One direction is common. Both directions is rare, and that's the gap.
Location pages are the most common orphans I see.
They get built in a batch, listed in a footer, and forgotten. Link each one from the services offered in that area, and from a locations hub.
If you're building them now, my local SEO work covers what each location page needs beyond links.
A services hub that links every service, and a locations hub that links every area, gives you a clean structure two clicks from the homepage.
Then link the hubs from the main menu.
Case studies and reviews should link to the service they prove.
A visitor reading a result wants to know how to get the same thing.
Say you're a plumbing firm with five services and eight towns.
That's 40 possible service-and-town pairings. You won't want a page for each, but each service page should link to the towns where you offer it, and each town page should link back to its services.
Now add two industries you serve, such as landlords and restaurants. Each industry page links to the services those customers buy. Each of those services links back.
Write those rules down once.
Then you can check every page against them, instead of guessing.
Shops follow the same logic with different roles.
Categories do the job service pages do.
Every category should link to its subcategories, and every subcategory back to its parent through breadcrumbs.
Your most important categories should sit close to the homepage in clicks.
Someone browsing "trail running shoes" may want "road running shoes".
A short block of sibling links on category pages helps people and spreads links across the tree. My guide to optimising WooCommerce category pages goes deeper on category page structure.
Products should link to their category.
Related-product blocks then link products to each other.
Check those blocks link to products that are in stock and indexable, not to dead ends.
A buying guide ("how to choose running shoes") is often the page that earns links from other sites.
Use it. Link from the guide into the categories it discusses, at the point where the reader is ready to browse. That passes attention from the page people find to the page that sells.
Filtered views (size, colour, price) can create huge numbers of URL combinations.
Link only the filtered views you actually want found, and make sure the rest aren't linked in crawlable form. On Shopify, duplicate product paths are a related issue, which I cover in Shopify duplicate content.
Platform specifics matter here, so I handle them separately for Shopify SEO and WooCommerce SEO.
Blog posts and guides attract links and visitors that service pages rarely do.
A guide that doesn't link to a money page wastes that.
Each guide should support one service or category. Link it there, in the body, where the problem it describes is discussed.
Group guides by topic under a pillar page. The pillar links to every guide in the cluster; each guide links back up.
My guide on building topic clusters covers how to plan the groups.
A new page with no incoming links is an orphan from the moment it goes live.
When you publish, find two or three existing pages that already discuss the topic and add a contextual link from each. A site search such as site:yourdomain.com "boiler repair" turns up candidates in seconds.
Make this part of your publishing routine, not a clean-up job for later.
Link a guide to another only when a reader would genuinely want it next.
A paragraph stuffed with five "related reading" links helps nobody.
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link.
It tells people and Google what's behind the link.
Google's guidance asks for anchors that are "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant" to both pages.
In practice:
A quick test: read only the anchor, out of context. If you can't guess what the target page is about, rewrite it.
Image links have anchor text too. Google's guidance says it uses an image's alt attribute as the anchor when the image is the link.
So a category tile with empty alt text is a link with no description. Write alt text that names the destination, such as "women's trail running shoes", on every linked image.
Buttons need the same care. "Shop now" on ten tiles tells nobody where each one goes.
Good links can be undone by technical problems.
Check for these.
Pages in your sitemap that no other page links to. Either link them from a relevant page or ask whether they should exist at all. Content pruning covers that decision.
Internal links to deleted pages, or links that hop through several redirects, waste visits and crawling.
Update links to point at the final URL.
After a migration, this is one of the first things to check, and the website migration checklist includes it.
Google's guidance says it can generally only crawl links that are anchor elements with an href attribute.
Menus built with click handlers and no href may hide whole sections of your site.
If a key page takes many clicks to reach from the homepage, it's signalling low importance. Bring it closer through hubs or body links.
These overlap with technical SEO, and on very large sites with crawl budget.
A full audit of a few hundred pages can produce a long list of missing links. You won't fix them all this week, so rank them.
Here's the order I use:
| Priority | What it covers | Why it comes here |
|---|---|---|
| P1 | Orphaned money pages, broken links, key services with no body links in | These pages can't do their job until fixed |
| P2 | Missing service-industry and service-location links, pillar-cluster gaps | They shape how the money pages relate |
| P3 | Guide-to-guide links, extra sibling links, anchor rewording | Useful polish once the backbone is in place |
Group anything that repeats across a template into one task.
If every location page is missing a link to the locations hub, that's one change to the template, not 40 separate edits. Your developer will thank you.
Tip: put the page to edit, the page to link to, a suggested anchor and the reason on each row. Whoever makes the change shouldn't need to ask you.
These are the patterns I see undo otherwise sensible structures.
Keyword-matching plugins insert links wherever a phrase appears.
They don't know which pages earn you money, and they can't see gaps in menus or templates. You end up with links nobody chose.
Your logo already links home on every page. Extra "home" links in body copy add nothing.
Spend those links on the services and categories that need support.
If "SEO audit" links to your audit service in one post and to a blog guide in another, you're sending mixed signals about which page owns the topic.
Pick one target per phrase.
It also helps you avoid keyword cannibalisation.
Google's guidance reserves nofollow for links you don't trust or were paid for. Your own service pages are neither.
If you don't want a page found, deal with the page itself.
Five links in three lines and your reader can't tell which one matters.
One or two well-placed links per section beats a cluster.
Internal linking decays.
Every new page, redesign or migration changes your link map.
Google Search Console's Links report shows which of your pages are most linked internally.
It's a quick sanity check that your money pages are near the top.
After every batch of new pages. After a redesign or template change. After a migration. And on a regular schedule for sites that publish often.
On sites with hundreds of pages, doing this by hand is slow and patchy.
That's why I run it as an internal linking automation pipeline: a crawl from the live sitemap, links tagged by position, pages classified by role, then a ranked list of fixes.
One example is my managed IT case study, where an internal link audit was part of the work.
A strategy is only useful once it becomes specific tasks: this page, link to that page, with this anchor.
Start with your money pages. Label every page's role, then check that each service, category and location has body links in from the pages that should support it.
The next step is finding the gaps across the whole site.
My guide on how to find internal linking opportunities walks through that process step by step.
If you'd rather hand it over, I can crawl your site and deliver a prioritised internal linking task list your designer or developer can work through.
There is no fixed number. Google's own link guidance says there is no magical ideal number of links per page, and that if it feels like too much, it probably is. Aim for enough contextual links that each important page is reachable from the pages a visitor would logically read before it, and no more.
Almost never. Google's guidance describes nofollow for links you don't trust or were paid for, which doesn't describe links between your own pages. If you don't want a page found or indexed, use the right tool for that, such as a noindex tag or removing the page, rather than nofollowing links to it.
Yes, they are crawlable links like any other. They are useful for making key pages reachable from everywhere. But because they repeat on every page, they say little about how two specific pages relate. Contextual links in the body, with descriptive anchors, do that job, so a good strategy uses both.
Descriptive anchors that include the topic of the target page are normal and helpful. The problem is forcing the same exact phrase into every link. Google's link guidance warns against cramming keywords into anchor text. Vary the wording naturally and make sure each anchor makes sense out of context.
I wouldn't rely on one. Keyword-matching plugins insert links wherever a phrase appears, without knowing which pages matter most or whether the link reads naturally. They also can't see gaps in menus, footers or templates. A crawl-based task list that a person works through gives you the speed without the clumsy links.
About the author
Kristijan Gjorgjioski
Independent SEO consultant · 6+ years in SEO · 60+ client websites worked on
I'm an independent SEO consultant with 6+ years in SEO. I run audits, migrations and content programmes for businesses in Europe, the UK and the USA, and I build the automation behind my own research.
Book a free 30-minute call. I look at your site first and tell you plainly what I would fix, and in what order.