On a new blog, every post tends to sit alone. Someone lands on one article from search, reads it and leaves, even if you wrote three other posts that answer their next question. Internal links fix that. They are free, they take minutes, and Google’s own documentation treats them as a basic part of helping both people and its crawler find your pages.
What Google Says About Links
Google’s Search Central guide to link best practices covers a few points that matter for a small site:
- Google can reliably follow links built as a normal HTML link with an address. The standard link tool in WordPress does this for you.
- Every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site.
- Anchor text, the clickable words, should describe where the link goes. Generic phrases like “click here” or “read more” tell readers and Google very little.
- Don’t stuff anchor text with keywords. Google lists that as a spam practice. Write naturally.
- Don’t overload a page with links, and avoid stacking several links right next to each other where readers can’t tell them apart.
That’s most of it. The rest is building a habit.
A Four-Part System for a Small Blog
1. Pick Your Cornerstone Posts
Choose the three to five posts that best explain what your site is about, the ones you would send a new reader to first. These should get the most internal links over time.
2. Link Forward When You Publish
Every new post should link to at least one or two older, related posts, in the sentence where they help. If you mention keyword research in passing, link the words “keyword research” to your guide on it. That is natural, descriptive anchor text.
3. Link Back Once a Month
This is the step most people skip. Older posts don’t know about newer ones unless you tell them. Once a month, open your newest post, think of two older posts that should point to it, and add one sentence with a link in each.
4. Check for Orphans
An orphan is a post nothing else links to. Go through your post list once a quarter and make sure each post you care about has at least one link from another page. Your analytics can help here: a useful post with almost no views may simply be hard to find.
Small Rules That Keep It Clean
- Link to the most specific page, not just the category or the home page.
- Keep anchor text short and specific: “how to repurpose a blog post” beats “this post.”
- Only link where it helps the reader take the next step. If a link feels forced, leave it out.
- Fix broken internal links when you change a slug or delete a post.
Do This Today
Open your three most recent posts. In each one, add one sentence with a descriptive link to an older related post, and in one older post, add a link back to your newest article. That’s four links in under an hour.
More on Totally Relentless
- Keyword Research on a Budget: A Beginner’s Guide for Small Sites
- How to Repurpose One Blog Post Into a Week of Content
- Simple Analytics for a Side Business: What to Track and How
