Internal Linking
Pillar/Cluster Model
- Pillar page: broad topic, targets head keyword (e.g. "SEO Guide")
- Cluster pages: subtopics, target long-tail (e.g. "SEO meta tags", "SEO schema")
- Cluster pages link up to pillar
- Pillar links down to all cluster pages
- Cluster pages cross-link contextually
Anchor Text Rules
- ✅ Descriptive, varied, natural ("learn how to validate JSON-LD")
- ❌ Generic ("click here", "read more")
- ❌ Over-optimized exact match (looks spammy, can trigger penalties)
Audits
- Orphan pages: pages with 0 internal incoming links
- Click depth: every page reachable in ≤ 3 clicks from homepage
- Link distribution: no page concentrates >10% of internal links
- Broken internal links: 404s within site
Workflow
- Crawl site (cheerio + breadth-first)
- Build link graph (page → outgoing links)
- Compute click depth from homepage
- Detect orphans and dead ends
- Suggest contextual link insertions based on topic clusters