What Are Internal Links, and Why Does Every Page Need Them?
A Santa Barbara business can have a great page about exactly the service a customer is searching for, and still never show up for it. One of the most common reasons is also one of the least talked about: nothing else on the site links to that page. As an SEO company in Santa Barbara, it is one of the first things we check, because it is cheap to fix and it quietly costs a lot when it is broken.
Those links between your own pages have a name. They are called internal links.
The hallways between your rooms
An internal link is just a link from one page on your site to another page on your site. The menu at the top is made of them. So is a line in a blog post that says “see our kitchen remodeling page” and takes you there.
They do two jobs. They help a visitor get from the question they had to the page that answers it. And they show Google the way around. Google finds pages by following links, and it leans on your own links to work out which pages you think matter. Google says it plainly.
Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.Google Search Central, Link best practices for Google
Every page you care about. Not your favorite three. Every one.
A page nothing links to is a store with no door
Here is a small website drawn as a map. Every page is joined to the others, except one.
The page off to the side might be the best page on the site, written for exactly the search a customer types. With nothing pointing to it, Google rarely gets there, and when it does, nothing tells it the page matters.
Pages end up like that all the time, and for boring reasons. Somebody adds a page and forgets to put it in the menu. A blog post goes up and never links to the service it is about. A site gets redesigned and the old links quietly disappear. The page is still there. It just has no door.
The words you link matter too
The clickable words in a link are called anchor text, and Google reads them as a label for the page on the other end. “Click here” tells it nothing. Google’s advice is short.
Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to.Google Search Central, Link best practices for Google
For more on our remodeling work, click here.
We cover cabinets, counters and layouts on our kitchen remodeling page.
We also do bathrooms. Learn more.
See what goes into a bathroom remodel in Santa Barbara.
One caution: describing the page is not the same as stuffing the same keyword into every link. Write it the way you would say it to a customer, and vary it from link to link.
How to put the doors in
For a small business site, the fix is not complicated. It is just easy to never get around to.
- Every service gets its own page, and every one of those pages is reachable from the menu or the home page. We explained why one page per job matters in how many pages you need to rank.
- Every blog post links to the service it is about, in the words a customer would use.
- Related pages point to each other. A kitchen page and a cabinet page should know the other exists.
- One page per search, clearly. When two of your pages say the same thing and link to each other the same way, Google has to guess which one to show, and sometimes it guesses wrong. That is the problem behind Google showing the wrong page for your business.
We do this on our own site. Every post we publish links to a handful of our other pages, chosen on purpose, so each one sends readers and Google to the next useful place. It is a small habit, and it is part of every digital marketing plan we run.
Send us your website. We will show you which of your pages nothing points to, which pages are competing with each other, and the handful of links that would fix it. No charge, and no obligation. Or call or text 805.243.8321.
Get My Free Visibility ReportGreat pages need a way in. Building the hallways between them is not glamorous, but it is one of the most reliable pieces of SEO there is.