Internal linking is the highest-leverage on-page lever most teams underuse. Get the hub-and-spoke pattern right and every other SEO investment compounds faster.
The topic map
Start with a topic map: one pillar URL per topic, 8–15 spoke URLs beneath it. Every spoke links up to the pillar; the pillar links out to every spoke; spokes cross-link horizontally.
Anchor text discipline
Use descriptive, entity-anchored text. Avoid 'click here' and generic anchors. Vary anchors across the cluster to avoid over-optimization signals.
Instrumentation
Track internal-link count per URL and inbound-cluster links per URL. A URL with fewer than three internal links from within its own cluster is under-supported.
Frequently asked questions
How many internal links per page?
There is no magic number. Enough to be genuinely useful; not so many that the page becomes a link farm. For most content pages, 5–15 contextual links is a healthy range.
Do sitewide navigation links count?
Yes, but they carry less relevance signal than contextual in-body links.
Tags
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