An internal linking strategy for blogs that you will actually keep up.

An internal link is any link from one page on your site to another page on your site. Your menu is made of them, so is your footer, and so is every “as I wrote in my post about…” you have ever typed. An internal linking strategy is just a deliberate answer to three questions: which pages should link to which, with what words, and how you will keep that true as the site grows.

That last part is where most strategies fail. It is easy to link carefully for a month. It is hard to still be doing it two years and three hundred posts later, which is when it matters most. So this guide spends as much time on priorities and routine as it does on principles. The principles are short. The habits are what make them work.

What internal links actually do

Internal links do four separate jobs. It is worth keeping them apart, because a link can be good at one and useless at another.

1. They let search engines find pages. Crawlers discover most pages by following links. A page with no links pointing at it can still be found through your sitemap, but it is found as an address, not as part of your site.
2. They tell search engines what pages are about. The linked words and the sentence around them describe the destination. Google’s own SEO starter guide asks site owners to write link text that describes the page it points to, for exactly this reason.
3. They signal which pages matter. A page that many of your other pages link to is, by your own account, more important than one that nothing links to. Search engines use that — it is the internal version of the same idea that made links from other sites valuable in the first place.
4. They send readers somewhere useful. A reader who reaches the end of a paragraph and sees the obvious next question linked is a reader who stays. This is the job that pays you directly, and the one most SEO advice treats as an afterthought.

A good internal link does all four at once: it is in a sentence a reader will actually reach, it describes where it goes, it points at a page worth reaching, and it is on a page a crawler visits often. Most weak links fail on the first or last of those.

Not every link counts the same

Not every link on a page is equal, to readers or to search engines. A useful way to think about it: the more a link looks like something a real reader would choose to click, the more it is worth.

The pattern is that links which repeat on every page — menus, sidebars, footers — are good for making a handful of pages easy to reach, and bad at saying anything about any single page. Links written into one specific sentence are the opposite. A healthy site uses both, but almost every site under-invests in the second kind, because it cannot be set up once in a theme.

The anatomy of a good internal link

Every contextual link has four parts worth getting right.

1. The source: which post the link is on

The ideal source is closely related to the destination, gets visits of its own, and has a sentence where the destination’s subject already comes up. A link from your most-read post on sourdough to your post on rye starters is worth more than a link from a two-year-old news post about your blog’s redesign — to readers and to search engines.

2. The anchor: the words that are linked

Short, specific, describing the destination: “a rye starter” rather than “this post”. There is a whole section on this below.

3. The context: the sentence around it

The surrounding sentence matters almost as much as the anchor. “If your starter smells of nail-polish remover, it is hungry — feed it twice a day for a week” tells a reader and a search engine exactly why the link is there. A list of links under “You may also like” tells neither.

4. The placement: where in the post it sits

Higher is generally better, because more readers reach it. Links in the main body are better than links in a closing list. Search engines are widely understood to weight links by how likely a reader is to use them — Google has patented approaches along exactly those lines — which is one more reason the reader-first choice and the SEO choice are usually the same one.

A contextual link that gets all four right looks like this, in a post on sanding hardwood:

Oak is forgiving at 120 grit, but walnut clogs paper quickly; if you are finishing either with oil, it is worth raising the grain with a damp cloth before the final pass.

No new words were added. The linked phrase describes the destination post exactly. It sits in the middle of a practical paragraph, at the moment a reader would want the detail.

Anchor text without overthinking it

Anchor text gets more anxious attention than any other part of internal linking, mostly because of advice written about links from other sites, where over-optimised anchors really can look manipulative. On your own site, the rules are simpler.

Four rules cover almost every case:

• Link the words that describe the destination, taken from the sentence you already wrote. If no sentence says it, the post may not be the right source.
• Keep it short. Two to five words usually. A whole sentence as a link is hard to read and says less, not more.
• Do not force a keyword in. If the natural phrase is “how long to boil them”, link that — not “soft boiled egg time chart” wedged into a sentence it does not fit.
• One destination per phrase. If two posts on your site could honestly answer “sinking funds”, that is a sign you have two posts competing for one topic — fix that, rather than splitting links between them.

Hubs, clusters and silos — what is worth copying

You will have seen diagrams of perfect site architectures: a pyramid, a set of silos, hub pages with spokes. Some of the thinking behind them is genuinely useful. Some of it is advice for building a new site from scratch, applied to archives that were never built that way.

What a hub is, and why it is worth having

A hub (also called a pillar page) is a page that gives a complete overview of one topic and links to every post on its sub-questions. The posts in turn link back to the hub, and to each other where it is natural. Together they are a cluster.

Hubs earn their place for three reasons:

• They keep whole topics shallow. If the hub is in your menu, every post in the cluster is at most two clicks from the home page, however old it is.
• They make the topic legible. A search engine — and a reader — can see at a glance that you cover growing tomatoes in pots thoroughly, not just once.
• They give every new post an obvious first link. Publish a post on blossom-end rot, add it to the hub, and it is linked on day one.

What to skip: strict silos

The strict version of siloing says posts should only link within their own topic, never across. The idea is to concentrate relevance. In practice it forbids exactly the links readers want: a travel post about Kyoto that cannot mention the Tokyo rail pass post, a parenting post on toddler sleep that cannot link to the one on daylight saving changes because it lives in a different category. There is no good public evidence that the restriction helps, and it clearly costs reader paths. Group your posts into clusters; link across clusters whenever a reader would.

How to build a hub on an existing archive

1. Pick a topic you already have five or more posts on. Look at your categories, or at the queries in Search Console that several of your posts appear for.
2. Decide whether a hub already exists. Often one of your posts is already the broadest — “The complete guide to…” — and just needs its links updated. Upgrading it is better than writing a new page that competes with it.
3. Write the hub as a real overview, not a list of links. A paragraph or two on each sub-question, with the link in the paragraph. A hub that is only links is thin, and readers bounce off it.
4. Link every cluster post back to the hub, from a sentence near the top where the broader topic comes up.
5. Put the hub in your menu or on a “start here” page, so it is one click from home.

Click depth: how far is too far

Click depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from your home page by the shortest route. It is one of the clearest numbers in internal linking, because it maps directly onto how easy a page is to find — for readers and crawlers alike.

The trouble on blogs is pagination. With ten posts per page, the home page shows your newest ten; “older posts” shows the next ten; and so on. Your 300th-newest post is about thirty clicks deep through that route. Categories help, but a popular category with 400 posts has the same problem inside it.

There is no official threshold, but a common working target is that anything you care about should be within three or four clicks of the home page through links a person would follow. You can get there in three ways, from most to least effective:

• Hubs in the menu, as above: two clicks for everything in the cluster.
• Contextual links from shallow, popular posts. Your most-visited posts tend to be linked from everywhere; a link from one of them pulls its destination up.
• Flatter archives — more posts per page, or numbered pagination instead of only “older posts”. This helps crawlers a little and readers hardly at all, so treat it as a supplement, not a fix.

When you measure click depth, measure it both ways: once with every link, and once counting only links written into content. The first tells you whether a crawler can reach the page. The second tells you whether anybody is likely to.

Deciding what to link first

On an archive of any size, there are always more links you could add than you will ever have time for. Order matters more than completeness. Here is the order that tends to pay back fastest:

1. Fix broken internal links. They send readers to a dead end and waste the link entirely. The fix is mechanical: point each one at the right live page.
2. Link your orphans that deserve it. Posts no other post links to, which are still accurate and useful. See how to find orphan pages in WordPress for the full method.
3. Link the posts that are close to page one. In Search Console, find pages with plenty of impressions and an average position roughly between 8 and 20. They are already relevant; a few good internal links are one of the cheapest nudges available.
4. Link the pages that earn money or sign-ups. Review posts, product round-ups, your course or service pages. If they are only reachable from the menu, you are leaving the most valuable clicks on the table.
5. Link new posts on publish day. Two or three links from older posts, the day a post goes live. This is the habit that keeps the other four from coming back.
6. Update links that go through redirects. They work, but every one is an extra hop for readers and crawlers, and a sign the archive has drifted.

A weekly routine that keeps it done

Here is a routine that fits in about half an hour a week and keeps an archive in good shape indefinitely. The numbers are a starting point; adjust them to how often you publish.

Five links a week does not sound like much. It is over 250 in a year, every one of them placed on purpose in a sentence that already existed. That is more considered internal linking than most sites ever do, and it never requires a lost weekend.

How to find the five

Keep a running list — a spreadsheet is fine — of pages that need links, in the priority order above. Each week, take the top five. For each one, search your own site for the topic (site:yourdomain.com "topic" in Google, or the WordPress admin search), pick the most related post that gets traffic, find the sentence where the topic already comes up, and link it. Note the date in your list.

Mistakes that undo the work

• Linking everything to everything. A post with forty internal links is not forty times as helpful. Each extra link makes every other one less likely to be clicked, and makes the post harder to read. Link where a reader would genuinely want to go next.
• Nofollow on internal links. It used to be suggested as a way to “save” link value for more important pages. That stopped working more than a decade ago; today it simply throws the link away. Leave internal links followed.
• Automatic keyword linking across the whole site. Rules that turn every mention of a phrase into a link are fast, but they link out of context, pile up links in the same posts, and are hard to audit or undo. If you use them, keep the rule list short and review what they produce.
• Links in headings, buttons and image captions. They are easy to miss, they change how headings read, and they are rarely what the reader wants at that moment. Keep links in running text.
• Generated “see also” sentences. Adding a new sentence to a post purely to hold a link changes your writing and usually reads like it. If no existing sentence fits, that post may not be the right place for the link.
• Deleting posts without redirects. Every internal link that pointed at the deleted post becomes a broken link, and anything the post had earned is lost. Redirect to the closest match and update the links.
• Treating it as a project. A one-off linking sprint decays within months as new posts arrive. A small weekly habit does not.

Measuring it honestly

Internal linking improves things through discovery and emphasis — which means its effects are real but indirect, and easy to over- or under-claim. Measure it like this:

• Track what you changed and when. A date against each linked page, in the same list you work from.
• Compare equal periods. For each page, compare impressions, clicks and average position over the same number of weeks before and after the link — and do the same for a few similar pages you did not touch, as a baseline.
• Give it one to three months. Links are usually recrawled within days or weeks. Changes in search performance take longer, and a single week tells you nothing.
• Look at reader behaviour too. Pages per visit, and clicks from the linking post to the linked one, tell you whether the links are useful to people — which is the part you can be most sure of.
• Expect a spread. Some pages will respond clearly. Many will move a little. Some will not move at all, and those are usually pages that need rewriting, not more links. That is useful to know too.

Where Silotree fits

The routine above is the whole idea behind Silotree, packaged: it finds the pages that need links most — orphans, buried posts, broken and redirected links — then suggests a link for each from a sentence you already wrote in a related post — five a week, by email, approve or skip. The plugin writes the ones you approve, never inside headings, captions, buttons or special blocks, saves a revision first, and can undo any batch. If you would rather do it by hand, the free internal link checker will still give you the priority list, with no account needed.

Questions people ask