Internal linking strategy: how to plan links that help pages rank

Search engines discover most pages by following links, and Google uses links, including internal ones, to understand the relative importance and topic of pages. A page with few internal links may be crawled rarely and treated as minor. A page linked prominently from many relevant pages is easier to find and signals importance. Internal links also guide readers to the next useful page.

Plan links on top of your topic structure.

Use anchor text that describes the target, such as 'canonical tag checker' or 'how to fix soft 404s', rather than 'click here' or 'read more'. Vary anchors naturally; there is no need to repeat an exact keyword. Links within the main body content carry context that footer and sidebar links lack. Link where a reader would genuinely want to go next, usually the first time a topic is mentioned.

Crawl the site with a tool such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to find orphan pages that no other page links to, pages buried many clicks deep, and internal links pointing to redirects or 404s. Compare the crawl with your sitemap: URLs in the sitemap but not reachable by links are orphans. Update links whenever you consolidate or move pages. Our internal link opportunity finder suggests pages that mention a topic without linking to the relevant page.

On sites with many pages, manage links in data rather than by hand: give each page a list of related pages and render them consistently. On serionflow.com, each growth page declares its related pages, and the build validator rejects links to pages that do not exist or have not yet been released, so a new page never links to a 404. SerionFlow applies the same approach to the pages it publishes for customers. SerionFlow is the wrong tool for relinking your existing site; it links its own pages and suggests links to your pages as advice.