Site Structure and Internal Linking for New Sites - a Simple Crawl-Friendly Model

Site structure is how you bucket pages into a hierarchy and paths. Internal linking is how you wire those pages together. For a new or small site, the winning pattern is often boring: a clear home, a handful of hubs (services, product families, resource topics), and leaves (individual articles, case studies) that point up to the right hub and across only when it helps a reader.

Depth and URL design

For a new site, resist the urge to mirror your internal org chart. Visitors rarely think in “regional / sub-regional / initiative”; they think in problems and outcomes. A shallow path from home to the page that answers their question is usually both a UX and crawl win.

• Keep important content within a few clicks of home - for most marketing sites, two or three levels (home → hub → detail) is enough to start.
• Stable URLs - avoid dates in URLs unless the content is a true archive product; slug on meaningful titles beats /blog/2024/01/post-3.
• One canonical URL per page; use breadcrumbs in UI to reinforce hierarchy, not a parallel tag cloud as the only navigation.

Hubs: where authority gathers

A hub is a scannable list or overview that answers “everything we offer on this theme” and links to the best child pages. Hubs are where contextual internal links from blog posts and campaign landing pages should often land first, not only to random deep URLs.

Topical map - pillars and clusters is the content side of the same idea; here we care about paths and menus.

When someone lands on a long article first, a good hub gives them a sensible next step (“here is the broader service family this belongs to”) without forcing them back through the home page.

Internal linking rules of thumb

Descriptive beats optimised in anchor text. Readers decide whether to click; search engines are downstream of that. Repeating the same commercial phrase in every link reads like automation, not help.

• Descriptive anchor - “Our approach to X” over “read more” or the same money keyword in every link.
• Relevance - link when the reader’s next step is obvious, not to hit a quota.
• Navigation + body - global menus for stable buckets; in-article links for narrative connections (related services, follow-up guides).

What to avoid

Footers that list fifty keyword-stuffed links were tired a decade ago; they still show up in fresh builds because someone copied an old “SEO checklist.” Prefer fewer links that match real navigation intent.

• Orphan pages (no internal links in) - except truly disposable campaign URLs you intentionally hide from site search.
• Link farms in footers to every city or keyword variant - looks manipulative and confuses people.
• Deep chains of category-of-category pages with no unique value per level.

Technical foundations: technical SEO priorities; for new locations, local SEO for multi-location when the site is a branch network.

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Frequently asked questions

How many internal links per page?

Enough for navigation; no fixed number. If a 2,000-word article has 50 same-keyword links, you have a different problem.

Should the blog link to products?

Yes, when the article naturally supports a journey - not a forced CTA in every paragraph.

XML sitemap vs internal links?

A sitemap is a hint; internal links tell systems what is important relative to other pages. You need both for healthy discovery.

Flat vs deep structure?

Slightly flat under each hub is easier to reason about than ten nested levels. Scale depth when you have content to match.

New site launch checklist?

Crawl the staging site, fix 404s/redirects, then ship with GSC + analytics on a clear URL plan.