A business with twelve pages rarely has the problem that Google cannot find its website. The problem sits one level deeper: the home page is easy to reach, no other page links to the page about the maintenance plan, and the guide with the most readers ends with a good answer but without a single link to the service it is really about. Internal links are the paths between these pages. They take visitors from a question to the matching offer, and they show a search engine which pages belong together and which of them matter to the business. This article covers the network of links in the day-to-day running of a website with five to twenty pages: how service pages are linked to each other and from the blog, which anchor texts carry weight, what navigation and footer do, and how to find pages without incoming links without any tool. How a single service page is built is covered in the article on one page per service instead of a catch-all page; which pages a business website needs in the first place is answered by the page plan for business websites.
Why internal links are more than click paths
Google states the job of links plainly: it uses them "as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl" (Google Search Central).
Its SEO starter guide adds that the vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are found through links (Google Search Central). For a small website this means a page that no link points to is hard for visitors to find and reachable for search engines only through detours such as the sitemap. The sitelinks Google shows below some search results as further pages of the same site also come from an analysis of the link structure; to improve them, Google recommends linking to your important pages from other relevant pages (Google Search Central). From this follows the basic rule that Google spells out in its link best practices:
Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.
How big the lever is depends on the size of the website. Google's guide to crawl budget is aimed primarily at large sites with 1 million+ unique pages whose content changes about once a week (Google crawling infrastructure) and at medium or larger sites with 10,000+ unique pages and content that changes daily (Google crawling infrastructure); by Google's own account, both figures are only approximate. A trade or practice website with twelve pages is far from either. Its bottleneck is not whether Google fetches the pages at all, but which page receives links, from which context and with which text. That is also what decides whether a visitor who arrives via a guide ends up at the offer or leaves the website after the first paragraph.
The page network of a small business
A typical service business website consists of the home page, a handful of service pages, a page about the business, the contact page, the legal pages and a blog with guides.
Between these pages there are three kinds of links: the navigation in the header, which is the same on every page; the footer, which also appears everywhere; and the links in the content, which only appear where one topic meets another. On top of that come grouped links at the end of a section, for example as a row of cards, and linked images such as project photos. Each kind has its own job, and none replaces another. The table shows what each place does and where it reaches its limit.
Scroll table sideways
| Where the link sits | What it does | Where it falls short |
|---|---|---|
| Main navigation in the header | Makes the most important pages reachable from every page | Limited space, no connection to the text being read |
| Text link in a paragraph | Connects two pages exactly where the topic comes up | Has to be maintained with every text change |
| Related links at the end of a section | Bundles two or three next steps with an explanatory sentence | Turns into a wall of cards once every page goes in |
| Footer | Complete list of services and legal pages on every page | Identical everywhere, so no link to the content |
| Linked image | Leads from a gallery or project straight to the service | Without alt text, the anchor text is missing |
| Blog post to service | Takes readers from search to the offer | Missing entirely in many posts |
Navigation and footer repeat on every page and therefore carry the same links everywhere. How many links a page typically carries is shown by the HTTP Archive's measurements: at the median, a page fetched on mobile contains 39 links to the same site (Web Almanac 2025). These recurring links matter because they make every page reachable from anywhere, and the guidelines for accessible web content demand exactly this reliability: navigation that repeats on several pages should appear there in the same relative order, according to success criterion 3.2.3 at level AA of WCAG 2.2 (W3C). A second criterion at the same level, 2.4.5, requires more than one way to locate each page of a website, except for steps in a process (W3C) – for instance menu plus text link, an overview page or search. What navigation and footer do not provide is context. A menu item "Bathrooms" says that the page exists. A sentence in the guide on bathroom costs that links to the fixed-price bathroom remodel says when it is the right one.
Linking service pages to each other
Which links a single service page carries as a matter of course – back to the overview, to related services, to the request path and to location pages – is covered in the article on service pages linked at the start.
In day-to-day operation the more important question is not "Which pages do I have?" but "What does a customer need next?". Someone planning a bathroom remodel often asks about tiles, a level-access shower or the radiator in the bathroom. Someone having a heating system replaced is often interested in maintenance afterward, too. These follow-up questions are the lines in the network, and they shift with every new offer and every new customer question. A service with no recognizable connection to the current page gets no link there just so that it is linked somewhere – that is what navigation and footer are for. A few simple rules help maintain these lines:
- Place the link where the topic first comes up in the text: in the paragraph about the shower area, link to the tiling page
- Check every link in both directions: if the bathroom page points to tiling, the tiling page usually points back to the bathroom page
- Take follow-up questions from real inquiries: if customers replacing their heating regularly ask about maintenance, the heating replacement page needs a link to the maintenance page
- Take the link along when rewriting a paragraph: if the sentence about tiles moves to another section, the link moves with it
- Remove services the business no longer offers from all texts instead of leaving links to a page that no longer exists
How many links there should be in total is something Google deliberately does not answer with a number: "There's no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain" (Google Search Central). Google's follow-up is the more useful rule of thumb: if you feel there are too many, you are probably right. For a service page this means in practice: navigation and footer stay as they are, the content holds the two or three links with a real connection, and the end of the page carries a short row of next steps. The same principle applies to images. Below a photographer's wedding gallery belongs a link to the wedding package, not to the overview of every offer; how portfolio and packages work together there is shown in the article on the photographer website with portfolio and booking requests.
One sentence of context per link
From the blog to the service
Guides answer the questions people search for before they contact a business: "What does a new bathroom cost?", "When does a heating replacement pay off?", "How often does grout need renewing?".
Someone arriving with such a question is not yet on the service page – and that is exactly where the post should take them. Every post therefore links to at least one service page, in two places: once in the text, where the service is first mentioned, and once at the end, when readers have their answer and look for the next step. In the other direction, a service page can link to one or two posts that answer a typical preliminary question in depth, such as cost, process or care. That keeps the service page short while the depth lives in the post.
XICflow has two blocks with similar names for these paths that do different things. According to the documentation of the content and blog blocks, the "Related posts" block shows links to blog posts sharing tags; the selection is made when the website is built. It looks for posts related to the one currently open, and the documentation notes: "On an ordinary page it therefore has no effect." So it connects posts with each other, not posts with services. The "Related links" block is meant for the path to the service page. You enter the targets yourself, flat as a list or in named groups, and each entry has the visible link text, the path and a sentence explaining the target. Because a post is a page like any other in the editor, the block can be placed at the end of a post just as well as below a service page.
Post to service
The main path. A link in the text where the service comes up and an entry in "Related links" at the end of the post. The link text names the service, not "here".
Service to post
One or two links to posts that answer a preliminary question: cost, process, care. The service page stays short, and anyone who wants more finds the depth one click away.
Post to post
"Related posts" handles this based on tags. Assign tags consistently and the suggestions fit; it does not replace a path to the service.
Anchor texts that name the service
The anchor text is the visible text of a link. It tells visitors and search engines what lies behind the link.
Google describes good anchor text as "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to" (Google Search Central). How often that is missed is measured by an annual analysis of one million home pages: 15.2 percent of the home pages tested had ambiguous link text such as "click here", "more" or "continue" (WebAIM Million 2026). On service pages three patterns come up most: the generic call such as "here" or "learn more", the bare page name without content such as "Services", and the opposite, a link text crammed with every search term. The table shows typical cases and a workable alternative.
Scroll table sideways
| Link text | What it tells the reader | Workable alternative |
|---|---|---|
| here | Nothing about the target; meaningless without the sentence before it | Fixed-price bathroom remodel |
| learn more | That there is more, but not where | Bathroom remodel process step by step |
| Services | That an overview exists, not which service is meant | Heating replacement for single-family homes |
| bathroom remodel cheap remodel bathroom fixed price now | Search terms instead of content, reads like advertising for machines | Fixed-price bathroom remodel |
| Project photo without alt text | A link without a name | Alt text that names the target: "Bathroom remodel projects" |
| Our services in the field of maintenance and servicing of heating systems of all kinds | Too long, the core gets lost | Heating maintenance |
Google is clear about cramming in search terms: excess keywords in anchor text are, according to the guide, against its spam policies (Google Search Central). Naturally worded link texts may vary – "fixed-price bathroom remodel" in one post, "bathroom remodel process" in another – as long as each one says on its own where it leads. Linked images are a case of their own, for example project photos that lead to the service. For them, Google uses the image's alt attribute as anchor text (Google Search Central), and that is exactly where it is often missing: one out of every four linked images on the home pages tested had no alternative text (WebAIM Million 2026). The guidelines for accessible web content start at the lowest level here: under success criterion 2.4.4 at level A, the purpose of each link must be determinable from the link text alone or together with its programmatically determined link context (W3C). How link texts work for people using screen readers is covered in more depth in the article on accessible writing.
Navigation, text link, footer: who does what
The navigation in the header is the table of contents of the website. It points to the service overview or, with only a few services, directly to the individual service pages, plus the page about the business, the blog and the contact page.
Little else belongs there, because every additional item makes the others harder to find. Not every page that needs a fixed place in the network needs it in the header. In XICflow you maintain the menu items per language in the header and footer area; according to the documentation on brand and design, there is an optional symbol and a mega menu of "Cards" and "Columns", and the "Footer only" option hides an item from the header. The header stays lean, and the item is still linked on every page.
The footer is the place for the complete list: all services, the legal pages, contact and directions. In XICflow you can create any number of "Footer columns" with a column title and links for this. For the page network, the footer has two properties: it makes every page entered there reachable from anywhere, and it provides no context because it is the same on every page. A service page that only appears in the footer is therefore linked, but not embedded in any text as the answer to a question. What belongs in the footer and what only takes up space there is covered in the article on the website footer.
Only real links count
Finding orphaned pages without a tool
An orphaned page is a page that no other link on your own website points to. With twelve pages, the search needs no tool, just a table.
The sitemap provides the list of all addresses: according to the documentation on publishing, XICflow regenerates it with every publish and lists every indexable address. Google's Search Console shows the most frequently linked pages within the site in its "Links" report, but according to Google's help the report does not contain all links on the website, only a selection (Google Search Console Help). For a small website your own count is therefore more reliable, and at this size it is done quickly:
- Copy all pages from the sitemap or the page list in the editor into a table, one row per page
- For each page, note where it is linked from: navigation, footer, text on another page, blog post, image
- Pages without a single entry are orphaned; pages that only appear in the footer are weakly connected
- For each of these pages, find the two pages where its topic already comes up, and add a text link carrying the name of the service there
- Review pages for which no fitting place turns up: is the service still offered? If not, remove the page with a redirect to the closest matching offer
The link plan for day-to-day operation
A page network does not fall apart all at once, but with every new post published without a link and every service added without the existing pages pointing to it.
When an address changes, update the internal links in the same pass so that no click runs through a redirect; how that works together with redirects during a bigger rebuild is described in the article on a relaunch without ranking loss. For everyday work, fixed occasions on which the network is maintained along the way are enough:
- New service page: add it to the overview the same day, enter it in the footer and link to it from two existing pages whose topic borders on the new service
- New post: link at least one service page in the text, add "Related links" at the end and link to the new post from an older post on the same topic
- Changed service: update page title, link texts on other pages and the entries in menu and footer in one pass
- Discontinued service: remove text links or point them to the closest matching offer instead of letting them run through a redirect
- Once a quarter: update the table from the section on orphaned pages and read every link text once without the sentence around it
With XICflow these tasks are work on the text, not on the technology. In the editor you edit headings, paragraphs and lists right in the layout, according to the editor feature overview with "accents, bold, italic and links included". You place "Related links" and "Related posts" as blocks, maintain menu items and footer columns per language in one place, and the sitemap is regenerated with every publish. Maintaining a website this way means the path to the service gets created while the post is being written, instead of being added later in a cleanup. Which scope comes with which plan is listed in the overview of plans.
The page network in brief