Internal linking: what to get right first

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. If you only fix one thing about internal linking this quarter, make it the first item below.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Start here

Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Then this

Descriptive anchor text beats "click here" every time. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Eventually

Orphan pages rarely rank at all. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

How to tell if yours is fine

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about internal linking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Orphan pages rarely rank at all — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.