Internal linking for SEO without over-optimisation
Anchor text variety, first links on the page, and navigation vs editorial links — practical rules that keep sites natural and effective.
Internal links do two jobs. They help a person find the next useful page, and they show search engines which pages belong together. The failures are familiar: a footer stuffed with the same keyword, every article pointing at one money page with identical anchor text, and an important service page that nothing in the body ever mentions. Hubs and spokes, covered in content hubs for service businesses, only work if those links exist.
Editorial links in body copy carry the most intent
- Use natural language anchors most of the time; exact-match sparingly where it reads well.
- Link where the reader would plausibly want the next step — not every paragraph.
- Audit commercial pages a few times a year and check each one has a link from a relevant article or from the main navigation.
- Fix links that point at redirects or removed pages. A chain of old URLs is not a linking strategy.
Navigation, breadcrumbs and the first link
The main menu should list the services you want to be known for, by names customers use. Breadcrumbs help on deep pages. If a blog post mentions a service, the first time you link it should go to the page you want to rank, not to a tag archive or a vague “services” index. Repeated exact-match anchors across dozens of posts are unnecessary. Write the sentence first, then link the phrase a person would click.
Related on this site
Questions people ask
How many internal links should a blog post have?
Enough that a reader can take the next step, usually a few in the copy plus a short related list. Linking every paragraph to the same service page with the same words looks mechanical and is less useful.
Do footer links count?
They help people move around the site. They are a weak way to show which page is important for a topic. A sentence in the article that names the next page carries more intent.
What is an orphan page?
A URL that nothing else on the site links to. It can still be in the sitemap, but visitors and search engines are less likely to treat it as part of the site. Commercial pages should be reachable from the menu or from a relevant article.
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