Internal links, URLs and images are the plumbing of a website. Nobody notices them when they work well, but when they're neglected, important pages become hard to find, URLs become confusing, and images slow pages down and go unseen in image search. This lesson covers practical best practice for all three.

Internal links

An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another. Internal links do three jobs:

  1. Discovery. Search engines find most pages by following links. A page with no internal links pointing to it (an orphan page) may be found late or not at all, even if it's in your sitemap.
  2. Context. The link's anchor text and surrounding words tell search engines what the target page is about.
  3. Importance. Pages linked from many places, especially from prominent pages like the home page and main navigation, are signalled as important.

They also help people move to the next useful page, which is the main reason to add them.

Make links crawlable

Google can reliably follow a link only when it's an HTML anchor element with an href attribute:

  • Good: <a href="/services/roof-restoration/">Roof restoration</a>
  • Unreliable: a span or div with a JavaScript click handler and no href, or links only reachable after a user interaction such as typing in a search box.

This matters on JavaScript-heavy sites built with frameworks like React, where developers sometimes build "links" that aren't real links.

Write descriptive anchor text

Anchor text should tell the reader and search engines what they'll find:

Weak Better
Click here See our roof restoration process
Read more How much does roof restoration cost in Newcastle?
This page our guide to choosing roof paint colours

Be natural and varied. Don't force exact-match keywords into every link; that reads badly and can look manipulative.

Structure your links

  • Main navigation: your most important categories and services.
  • Hubs and spokes: a hub page ("Commercial cleaning") linking to each specific service, and each service linking back to the hub.
  • Contextual links in body text: from a guide to the related service ("If your tiles are cracked, our tile repair team can help"), and between related guides.
  • Breadcrumbs showing the page's place in the hierarchy (Home › Services › Roofing › Roof restoration).
  • Related items: related products, articles or locations.

A useful principle is that important pages should be reachable within a few clicks from the home page. Pages buried deep in pagination or several sub-menus are discovered and refreshed less often.

Finding and fixing link problems

A crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, or a site audit tool, will show:

  • Broken internal links (to pages returning 404). Update them to the correct URL.
  • Links to redirected URLs. Update them to point directly to the final URL, avoiding redirect chains.
  • Orphan pages (compare crawled URLs with your sitemap and analytics).
  • Click depth for each page.

Search Console's Links report shows which of your pages have the most internal links. If a key service page has very few, add links from relevant pages.

URL structure

Good URLs are readable, predictable and stable.

  • Use words, not IDs: /services/technical-seo/ is clearer than /p?id=4821.
  • Separate words with hyphens, not underscores or spaces. Google treats hyphens as word separators.
  • Use lowercase consistently; URLs can be case-sensitive, so /Services/ and /services/ may be different pages.
  • Keep them short and logical, reflecting the site structure where helpful: /locations/brisbane/, /blog/how-to-choose-solar-panels/.
  • Avoid unnecessary parameters, session IDs and dates in evergreen content URLs.
  • Pick one format for trailing slashes and www/non-www, and redirect the alternatives.
  • For international sites, use a clear structure such as country subfolders (/au/, /uk/) or country domains (.com.au, .co.uk), combined with hreflang.

Changing URLs

URLs should rarely change. If you must change them, for example in a site migration, 301 redirect each old URL to its most relevant new URL (not everything to the home page), update internal links to the new URLs, and update your sitemap. Expect some temporary ranking fluctuation. Keep redirects in place for at least a year, ideally permanently.

Images

Images help people understand products, services and instructions, and Google Images can be a significant traffic source for visual industries like fashion, furniture, recipes and travel.

Help search engines understand images

  • Use an img element for content images. Images applied only as CSS backgrounds aren't indexed as content images.
  • Write descriptive alt text. Alt text is read aloud by screen readers and helps search engines understand the image. Describe what's shown and why it matters: "Rendered brick veneer home in Ballarat after roof restoration, charcoal Colorbond roof". Don't stuff keywords.
  • Decorative images (dividers, background patterns) should use empty alt text (alt="") so screen readers skip them.
  • Use descriptive file names: roof-restoration-ballarat.jpg rather than IMG_4821.jpg.
  • Place images near relevant text and use captions where helpful; surrounding text provides context.
  • Use original images where possible. Stock photos add little; real photos of your work demonstrate experience.

Make images fast

Images are often the largest files on a page and a common cause of slow Largest Contentful Paint.

  • Compress images and use modern formats like WebP or AVIF, with fallbacks if needed.
  • Serve appropriately sized images with srcset so phones don't download desktop-sized files.
  • Specify width and height (or aspect ratio) to prevent layout shift as images load.
  • Lazy-load images below the fold with loading="lazy", but don't lazy-load the main hero image, which should load as early as possible.

Worked example: a Melbourne furniture retailer

A retailer's product images were 3–5 MB JPEGs named by camera number, with no alt text, and its "Dining tables" category was only linked from a mega-menu built with JavaScript click handlers. Fixes included converting images to WebP at correct sizes, adding alt text describing material, colour and style, changing the menu to real anchor links, and adding contextual links from buying guides to categories. Mobile pages loaded far faster, the category pages were crawled more frequently, and product images began appearing in Google Images for searches like "oak extendable dining table".

Internal linking for different types of site

How you apply these principles depends on the site:

  • Local service business (10–50 pages): link the home page to every core service and main location; link each service page to related services and relevant guides; link each guide to the service it supports. A footer with service areas is fine if it's genuinely useful, but don't cram in hundreds of suburb links.
  • Ecommerce store: categories and subcategories carry most internal link value through navigation and breadcrumbs. Add links from buying guides to categories, between complementary products ("goes well with"), and from popular products to their category. Make sure filters don't create thousands of crawlable, near-duplicate URLs; control them with canonical tags, robots rules or by not linking to low-value combinations.
  • Publisher or blog: use topic hubs (category or tag pages with real introductions), link new articles to older relevant pieces, and go back to update older articles with links to new ones.
  • Multi-country site: link between equivalent country pages via a clear country selector and hreflang, and keep each country's navigation pointing to its own pages.

Pagination and "load more"

Category pages split across several pages should use normal links to each page (?page=2 or /page/2/) so products deeper in the list can be discovered. "Infinite scroll" or "load more" buttons that only work with JavaScript can hide products from crawlers unless each batch also has its own linkable URL.

Nofollow on internal links

Don't add rel="nofollow" to your own internal links to try to "sculpt" importance. It doesn't work the way people hope, and it can stop pages being discovered. Use nofollow (or rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc") for paid and user-generated links to other sites.

Key takeaways

  • Internal links drive discovery, context and importance; use real anchor elements with href.
  • Write descriptive anchor text and keep important pages within a few clicks of the home page.
  • Fix broken links, redirect chains and orphan pages regularly.
  • Use readable, lowercase, hyphenated, stable URLs, and 301 redirect when they change.
  • Give images descriptive alt text and file names, use img elements, and keep them fast.