SEO PlaysInternal linking strategy for a small site
Every page you own holds some authority, and links are how it moves. External links decide how much of it arrives at your domain; internal links decide where it goes once it is there — and internal PageRank flow is the only part of the system you fully control.
On a small site the effect is legible, because the numbers are small. A couple of links from your highest-impression pages is a meaningful share of what those pages have to give, pointed wherever you choose to point them.
The other half of the job is reachability. A page with no internal links pointing at it is invisible to a crawler and to a reader, however good it is, and most sites carry more of those than their owners expect. A crawl and a spreadsheet find all of them in an afternoon.
What you get
Every important page reachable in three clicks with descriptive anchors, and link authority steered to the pages that earn money.
Steps
- Crawl your site with a free crawler (Screaming Frog is free up to 500 URLs) and export every URL with its count of internal inlinks.
- Mark the orphans (zero internal inlinks) and the one-link pages; these are invisible to both crawlers and readers.
- Pick your five to ten money pages — the ones that convert or define the site.
- In Search Console, find your highest-impression pages; they have the most internal authority to give.
- From each high-impression page, add one to three in-context links to money pages. Anchors describe the target ("directory screening criteria"), never "click here", and never the same phrase every time.
- Wire each topic hub to all of its member pages, and each member to the hub plus two or three siblings, so anything landing anywhere in the topic can reach the rest of it.
- Fix every orphan: give it three or more inlinks, or merge it into a page that deserves them, or remove it.
- Recrawl to confirm zero orphans and click depth of three or less, then repeat the pass quarterly and link every new post from two old ones on publish day.
How to verify it worked
- The recrawl shows no orphan pages and maximum click depth of three.
- Search Console positions for the money pages over the following four to eight weeks against their baseline.
Why it works
None of this needs a plugin, and it only holds if you repeat it: a quarterly pass, plus two links from older posts on the day anything new goes up. This site runs the play on itself — every play links its hub, its siblings, and the index.
Evidence
Practitioner report, 2026-08: internal-link planning as one of the three moves in a Search Console rewrite loop credited with lifting pages from positions 8-15 into the top three (claim as reported).
A 22-post practitioner cluster in our year of distilled posts credits pillar-and-cluster interlinking for ranking lifts across whole topics.
Last reviewed: 2026-09-01. A play whose evidence stops holding up is rewritten or retired.