Site structure and internal linking basics

Demo content — a placeholder explainer post on site structure fundamentals.

Search engines build their understanding of a site largely from how its pages link to each other. Get the structure right and even simple content ranks well; get it wrong and even excellent content can stay invisible.

Crawl depth

Crawl depth is how many clicks it takes to reach a page starting from the homepage. Pages buried five or six clicks deep get crawled less often and pass less authority than pages one or two clicks away — which is why flatter structures generally outperform deep, nested ones.

Topic clusters

Instead of publishing isolated pages, group related content around a central "pillar" page:

• One comprehensive pillar page covering the broad topic
• Several supporting pages covering specific sub-topics in depth
• Links running both ways between the pillar and its supporting pages

This tells search engines the whole cluster is authoritative on the subject, not just any single page in it.

A simple internal link check

function isOrphaned(page: { slug: string }, allLinks: string[]) {
  return !allLinks.includes(page.slug);
}

Running a check like this across a site catches pages that were published but never linked to from anywhere else — effectively invisible to both users and crawlers.

Anchor text

Anchor text is one of the few places you get to tell search engines, in plain words, what the linked page is about — wasting it on "click here" is a missed signal, not just a stylistic choice.

Descriptive anchor text ("Core Web Vitals overview" rather than "read more") reinforces the topic of the destination page every time it's used.

For a deeper technical reference, see Google's guide to link best practices. Good structure is invisible when it works — visitors and crawlers alike just find what they're looking for.