Internal Linking

Internal linking means the links that go from one page of your site to another page of the same site. A link from your home page to your prices page counts, while a link to a supplier's website does not. It sounds like tidying up, which is why most owners leave it to whoever built the site. In practice it quietly decides which of your pages Google treats as important.

Treat every link as a small recommendation, because that is roughly how a search engine reads it. If five of your pages point at your delivery page, you are telling readers and Google that delivery matters here. If nothing points at it, you are saying the opposite, whether you meant to or not.

That brings up the most common fault on a website, and it even has a name. An orphan page is a page that nothing links to, so it exists and it opens if you type the address, yet no click leads to it. Orphans appear after a redesign, or after a campaign that ended in a hurry and left its pages behind. The test takes a minute, because you just open your home page and try to reach the page with clicks alone. If you cannot get there, most visitors never will, which is why Linkysoft finds orphans on nearly every site it takes over.

A menu link and a link inside a sentence are not the same thing, even though both are internal. The menu sits on every page, so it says very little about any single one. A link written into a paragraph was chosen for that sentence, and the words around it explain why the page is worth opening. Both are useful, but only the second one carries an opinion.

The habit worth keeping is to spend ten minutes on links every time you publish something new. Add them from two or three older pages people already read, so the new page arrives with visitors instead of waiting for them. Most owners publish and move on, which is why their newest work sits unread for months.

Linkysoft draws that map before the first screen is designed, because a menu invented at the end usually hides half the site. So if you are planning a new website design and build, ask how the pages will link to each other, not just what they will look like. Our digital marketing team re-checks that map every month, because orphans come back every time somebody adds a page in a hurry.