Internal linking is simply the links on your own website that connect one of your pages to another. Done well, it tells Google — and your visitors — which pages matter most, and it makes sure no page on your site is invisible just because nothing points to it.
Internal linking is the network of links that connect the pages of your own website to each other — a blog post linking to a service page, a service page linking to another related service, your homepage linking down to your main offerings. Unlike backlinks, which come from other websites, internal links are entirely within your control.
Google uses those links to do two things: discover pages it hasn't found yet, and estimate how important each page is relative to the rest of your site. A page with many relevant internal links pointing to it, especially from other important pages, generally reads to Google as more central to what your business does. A page with none is easy for Google to overlook — and easy for a visitor to miss too.
For most small business sites, the clearest structure is what's often called hub-and-spoke. A broad "hub" page — like a general services page — links out to several narrower "spoke" pages that each go deep on one specific offering. Those spoke pages link back up to the hub, and sideways to a few closely related spokes, but the hub stays the central connector rather than every page linking randomly to every other page.
A visitor who lands on a narrow spoke page for one specific service should never be one click away from a dead end — they should be led back to the broader hub and sideways to the handful of related services they're likely to also need. This page, for instance, sits as a spoke underneath our on-page SEO hub, alongside closely related pages on heading structure and title tags, each reinforcing the others rather than competing for the same search terms.
This is the same organizing principle behind heading structure on the linked pages — a clean hierarchy, applied at the level of the whole site instead of a single page.
Anchor text is the clickable words in a link — not the URL itself, but what a visitor actually reads and clicks on. "Click here" tells Google and a visitor nothing about where the link goes. "Our on-page SEO service" tells both of them exactly what to expect on the other side.
Good anchor text is specific, honest, and varied. Linking to the same page with the exact same three words every single time can look mechanical; describing the destination slightly differently each time, while staying accurate, reads more naturally and gives Google a fuller sense of what that page covers from multiple angles.
An orphan page is a page that exists on your site but has no internal links pointing to it from anywhere else. Google might still discover it through a sitemap file, but it receives almost no internal authority, and a real visitor browsing your site has no path to ever land on it by clicking around. We find these constantly on sites that have been rebuilt or reorganized over the years — old service pages, forgotten landing pages, location pages nobody remembered to link from the main site.
There's no exact ceiling, but the honest test is usability: if a page has so many links that a visitor can't tell which one matters most, it has too many. A cluttered page also spreads whatever authority it has thinly across dozens of destinations instead of meaningfully supporting a handful of important ones. We aim for a page to link to the handful of other pages that are genuinely the most relevant next step for that reader — not every page that could theoretically be related.
We build a full map of your site's existing links, showing which pages are well-connected and which ones are orphaned or under-linked.
We flag the pages that should be earning the most links — usually the ones tied directly to leads and revenue — and check whether they're getting them.
We add missing links with clear anchor text, rescue orphan pages, and connect related content across your site, including our website optimization checklist.
Straight answers to the questions we hear most about linking your own pages together.
Internal linking is one part of our on-page SEO service and our broader SEO and website optimization for New York businesses. It also connects to how you earn backlinks pointing at your site from elsewhere — internal structure decides where that outside authority flows once it arrives.
Internal link structure degrades as a site grows, not because anyone breaks it on purpose. A new service page gets published without anyone remembering to link to it from the hub it belongs under, and it sits effectively invisible to both visitors and Google. An old page gets removed or renamed and the links pointing to it go stale. The map that made sense with twenty pages doesn't hold up unchanged at eighty, so it needs to be redrawn as the site itself changes, not laid out once and left alone. See what continuous work costs each month.
We'll map your site's internal links and show you exactly which pages are orphaned or under-linked — free, no obligation, for our New York service areas.