Getting started with internal linking
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A short on-ramp to internal linking for teams who have not touched it before.
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What it costs to ignore
Internal links spread authority to the pages that need it. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Descriptive anchor text beats "click here" every time
- Change one thing and measure it
Orphan pages rarely rank at all. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
In practice
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about internal linking before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Descriptive anchor text beats "click here" every time — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.