A store selling trail shoes has a page for its best-selling waterproof model. It sits in the sitemap, but the only way to reach it is a filter on the category page that a crawler can't operate. Meanwhile a blog post about lacing techniques is linked from the footer of every page. Google's picture of which pages matter is the reverse of the owner's, and the owner built it that way without noticing.
Where a page sits in your site and what links to it decide how often Google visits it, how well Google understands it, and how much of the site's trust it inherits. You control structure completely. On most sites, though, nobody ever planned it.
Links are how Google finds pages and how it weighs them
Googlebot reaches a page by following a link to it. The same link does two more jobs. Its clickable words (the anchor text) tell Google what the destination is about, and it passes on a share of whatever trust the linking page has earned. Links from other sites do this too, but internal links are the ones you can add this afternoon.
So the pages with the most internal links pointing at them are the pages Google treats as the centre of your site. On most sites that centre is accidental. Every template links to the homepage, the blog index and the privacy policy, while the service page that pays the bills gets one link from a dropdown menu.
Google's documentation on crawlable links is strict about what counts: a link is an <a> tag with an href pointing at a real URL. A button that runs a script, a card that responds only to a click handler, or a menu that renders after a tap may look like a link to you. To Googlebot it can be nothing at all.
Keep money pages close to the homepage
Two things fall off with every click away from the homepage: how often Google crawls a page, and how much link signal reaches it. The homepage usually holds most of a site's external links, and each hop inward passes along a smaller share.
You'll read that everything must sit within three clicks. That isn't a Google rule, and Google's own crawl budget guide says crawl budget only becomes a constraint for sites with over a million pages, or over ten thousand pages that change daily. For everyone else the problem is priority, not budget. A page five clicks deep is crawled less often and inherits less, so it ranks behind a shallower page saying the same thing.
The shape that works is a pyramid. The homepage links to a handful of hub pages (service categories, product categories, main topics), and each hub links to the pages under it. Every page that earns money sits one click below a hub in the main navigation. A page reachable only through a filter, a search box or the sitemap isn't in the pyramid at all.
Build hubs that link down, and pages that link back up
A hub is one page that owns a topic and links to everything underneath it: a category page for waterproof trail shoes linking to each model. Each of those pages links back to the hub and sideways to its closest siblings.
Link signal concentrates on the hub, so the hub rather than a random sub-page is what Google shows for the broad term. Your own pages also stop competing for the same search, because Google can see which one is the main page for the topic. Mapping keywords to pages covers which page owns which search; Topic clusters covers building out the spokes.
Breadcrumbs give you the upward links for free. A trail like Home > Trail shoes > Waterproof links every page to its hub and the homepage. Add Breadcrumb structured data, which Google still supports, and the path can show in the search result itself.
Write anchor text that says what the page is
The anchor text is the clickable words. "Click here" and "read more" tell Google nothing. "Waterproof trail shoes for wide feet" says exactly what the destination is about, in the words a searcher uses.
Don't paste the same exact phrase on every link. Readers notice, and so does Google. Position matters as well. A link inside a paragraph about the destination is the clearest signal you can send. A footer link repeated on every page says little about any one of them.
Three habits waste links. The first is linking to a URL that redirects, so every click passes through a hop; point at the final URL instead. The second is adding nofollow to internal links. Google's 2019 announcement made nofollow a hint rather than a command, and on your own pages it only throws signal away. The third is leaving orphan pages, listed in the sitemap but linked from nowhere, which Google visits rarely.
Frequently asked questions
How to do internal linking in HTML?
Wrap the anchor text in an <a> tag and put the destination URL in its href attribute. Use a real, final URL rather than one that redirects. Buttons with scripts or click handlers don't count as links for Googlebot, however they look on screen.
What is the best linking strategy for SEO?
Build a pyramid. The homepage links to hubs, hubs link down to the pages beneath them, and those pages link back up and sideways to close siblings. Put every money page one click below a hub in the main navigation, and link to it from body text with anchor text that names what it is.
What are the three main types of SEO?
The usual split is technical, on-page and off-page. Internal linking straddles the first two: crawlable <a href> links are technical, while anchor text and the placement of links inside content are on-page choices. Links from other sites fall under off-page, and they're why the homepage tends to hold the most signal to pass inward.
What to take away
- Internal links are how Google finds your pages, learns what they're about from the anchor text, and decides which pages on your site matter most.
- Money pages belong one click below a hub that sits in the main navigation, reached through real links rather than filters, buttons or the footer.
- Hubs that link down to their pages, and pages that link back up, concentrate signal on one page per topic instead of splitting it.
- Descriptive anchor text inside real content is the strongest internal link you can build, and a page nothing links to is a page Google will mostly ignore.
Next
With the structure in place, the next job is the words Google shows for each page, in URLs, titles and meta descriptions.