The Cheapest Improvement Most Sites Never Make

Most sites link only through the menu

Pages sit in isolation, connected only by the navigation. Visitors reaching a blog post have no obvious route to the service it relates to.

Adding relevant links within the content is free, quick and one of the more reliable improvements available.

What good internal linking does

1. Moves visitors from information towards services
2. Signals what a page is about, through the words used to link to it
3. Distributes authority from popular pages to commercially important ones
4. Keeps people on the site longer, following what interests them

The link text matters. “Read more” tells nothing; “how our boiler servicing works” tells both the visitor and the search engine exactly what they will get.

A practical routine

• Every new page links to at least two existing relevant pages
• When publishing, add links to it from two older related pages
• Quarterly, check the pages with the fewest incoming links
• Link deliberately from your highest-traffic pages to your commercial ones

Link where it helps the reader

A link is useful where a reader might genuinely want more detail. Links inserted for their own sake are noticed and ignored.

If you would not mention it in conversation, do not link it.

Find the orphans

Pages nothing links to are hard to find and poorly understood by search engines. Most sites have a handful, usually including something commercially important.

A crawl finds them in minutes and fixing them is an afternoon's work.

Frequently asked questions