Internal Linking and URL Structure

Internal links are links from one page on your site to another. They help search engines discover new pages, and they help signal which pages are most important based on how often, and from where, they’re linked to.

The text used for a link, called anchor text, should describe what the linked page is about, for example "our guide to running shoe sizing" rather than just "click here".

URLs should be short, readable and descriptive, using hyphens to separate words. A URL like example.com/best-shoes-flat-feet is easier for people and search engines to understand than example.com/page?id=4837&cat=12.

The single most common, cheapest-to-fix problem on most sites is the orphan page: a page with only one internal link pointing to it, or none at all. Orphan pages get crawled less often and rank worse than equivalent content that’s properly connected, and the fix needs no new content or backlinks, just adding genuine links from related existing pages.

For content-heavy sites, the pillar-cluster model has become the standard structure: one comprehensive page covering a broad topic, surrounded by focused pages that each go deep on a subtopic and link back to it. AI systems increasingly read this kind of link structure as a signal of real topical depth, not just a ranking factor for traditional search. A reasonable starting point is three to ten contextual internal links per thousand words, placed naturally rather than forced in.