Internal linking

What an internal linking pass is

An internal linking pass is a decision about which pages on your site are supposed to make money, followed by the deliberate placement of links from your other pages to those ones. The links are written into the body text where a reader would want them, with wording that describes the destination. It is one pass across a whole site, not a setting switched on.

It is not link building. Nothing here involves other people's websites, and I do not buy, exchange or plant links elsewhere. It is also not an automated related-posts block. A box of five links generated by a plugin is not a decision, and a machine can tell the difference between a link a person placed in a sentence and a link a template printed.

When you need one

You need one when the site has grown past the point where anyone remembers what is on it. Around fifty pages is where it starts; a blog running for five years is where it becomes urgent. Articles get published, nothing points at them, and nothing points from them at the pages that take an inquiry.

The second sign is a site where the only links are in the navigation. Every page is one click from the menu, and no page tells you which of its siblings is the important one. The menu treats a page that earns and a page that does not as equals, because a menu cannot do anything else.

You do not need this if your site is under twenty pages. At that size everything is already close to everything, and the useful purchase is the audit that says which of those pages is worth keeping. You also do not need it if most of your pages are thin or duplicated; link them together and you have simply spread the problem. That is pruning and de-indexing first.

What gets done

• The money pages are named. Usually between five and fifteen: the service pages, the product or category pages, and the one or two articles that reliably produce inquiries. Everything else on the site exists to support them.
• Links are placed towards them. In the body text, in a sentence where a reader has just been given a reason to click. A link at the point of curiosity gets used; a link in a footer does not.
• Anchor text is varied. Every link to a page uses different words, drawn from the ways buyers describe the thing. Forty links reading “commercial roofing” word for word look manufactured, because they are.
• Orphan pages are found and connected. Pages with nothing pointing at them except the sitemap. Some deserve two links and a second life. Some should not exist, and the sheet says which is which.
• Existing links are pruned. Pages that link to thirty others are cut back. Everything linking to everything tells a reader nothing and tells a machine nothing, which is the most common mistake in this work and the reason plugins do not solve it.

The idea underneath is simple enough to state in a sentence. A link passes a little of one page's standing to another, and it also tells anyone reading which page you think matters. If you point everything at everything, you have said nothing. If you point your archive at the eight pages that take inquiries, you have said something, and it is the true thing.

What you get

The link sheet. One spreadsheet, one row per link to add: the page it goes on, the sentence it belongs in, the destination, and the exact anchor text. Written so somebody can apply it without making a judgement call on every row.

The map. A one-page picture of what points at what after the pass: the money pages in the middle, the supporting pages around them, the orphans marked. This is the document that makes the argument to whoever signs off.

The removals. A shorter list of existing links to take out, with a line on each saying why, and any page recommended for pruning rather than linking.

A worked example

An illustration. A Hamilton commercial cleaning company has a hundred and ninety pages: seven service pages, a contact page, and a blog going back eight years. The blog produces most of the site's visits and almost none of its inquiries, because a reader who arrives on an article about floor stripping is offered a menu and nothing else. Thirty-one articles have nothing pointing at them at all.

The pass names six money pages, five services and the quote-request page. About a hundred and forty links are placed from articles into those six, each inside a sentence that already mentioned the subject, each with its own wording: “how the stripping and sealing job is quoted”, “our floor care service”, “what a nightly clean includes”. Nine of the thirty-one orphans get links from two related articles each. The other twenty-two are recommended for deletion, because they duplicate one another and no link will fix that. A block of “related posts” on every article, generated by a plugin and pointing more or less at random, is switched off.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How many pages you have, which of them produce inquiries, and what you want a reader to do after landing on an article. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Based on the page count, agreed before anything starts.
3. The crawl and the data. Every page and every existing internal link pulled into one sheet, with read-only access to your analytics so the money pages are identified from what happens rather than from opinion.
4. The work. A hundred and fifty to two hundred pages take two to three weeks. You confirm the money page list before any link is written, because the whole pass depends on it.
5. Delivery. The link sheet, the map and the removals, applied by you or by me as website updates.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, based on the number of pages crawled and the number of links written. It is cheaper on a site whose headings and titles have already been dealt with, because the crawl and the reading are shared. The pricing page shows the four published ways of working, and the number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

The map usually shows that one subject is scattered across a dozen half-pages, and the answer is a cluster built around one page you intend to own, with the links pointing at it on purpose. The pass also turns up links that go nowhere, which is link checking. And where the anchor text on your site is mostly the phrase “click here”, descriptive link text fixes that for every reader, not only the ones arriving from a search. This piece of work is complete on its own, and nothing further is assumed.