Photo: Bokeh / Tomedia. Traffic Light at Night.
It is possible to spend a great deal of effort making a useful page and then give almost nobody a sensible way to reach it. The page exists. The URL works. Somewhere in a report it gets counted as content. On the actual website, it is effectively alone.
Internal linking is one of the less glamorous parts of SEO, which is unfortunate because you can usually do something about it without waiting for another website to cooperate.
The links inside your site help people move from what they are reading to what they need next. They also give search engines routes through the site and context about the pages they encounter. That is enough of a job to take seriously before adding a theory about exactly how much each link is worth.
Start with the important destinations
Decide which pages the business needs people to find. Core services, useful guides, product categories, contact information. Then look at the route from the homepage and from the pages that already receive visitors.
Can somebody reasonably get from an explanation of a problem to the service that addresses it? Can they find the detailed guide from the introductory page? Does the navigation use language a customer would recognise, or an internal label that only makes sense to the team?
Group related pages where people can find them. A technical SEO guide might link to explanations of rendering and performance. You don’t need to enforce an elaborate silo system that prevents a useful link because the two pages live in different folders.
If the reader needs the other page, give them a clear route to it. A structure that makes you hide relevant material to preserve a diagram probably needs a better diagram.
The words on the link are useful space
“Technical SEO audit checklist” tells somebody more than “click here” when the destination is a technical SEO audit checklist. It also makes the sentence easier to understand when the person is scanning for the link they need.
Google’s link guidance recommends concise, descriptive anchor text and crawlable links. It also says important pages should have a link from at least one other page on the site. Ordinary HTML links with a destination are a useful baseline for developers.
You don’t need the same exact phrase every time. Describe the destination naturally in the sentence you’re writing. Equally, you don’t need to invent an awkward variation just to create variety in an anchor report.
Read the paragraph after adding the link. If it no longer reads like a paragraph, or half the words are competing links, you may be trying to do too much in that one place.
Check pages that already do useful work
An existing guide that attracts readers can be a sensible place to introduce a related page. So can a service page that leaves a technical detail to a fuller explanation elsewhere. The connection should be useful in its own right.
This gives you something concrete to do with older content. You can add a missing route, replace a broken destination or update a link after consolidating several pages. It is less visible than publishing something new, but it can make the work you’ve already paid for more usable.
Be careful with links generated automatically across an entire site. They can help with consistent navigation. They can also produce irrelevant repetition at a scale that would be tedious to create by hand. Inspect the actual pages rather than assuming the rule made every decision well.
Try the journey yourself
Choose one useful page and start somewhere else on the site. Follow the links a customer would have available. If finding the destination requires you to remember its URL, you’ve found something worth improving.
For more on linking and site structure, you can buy The Big Book of SEO on Ephemera. Start with the pages you already have. Making a useful page easier to find is a better use of the afternoon than commissioning another one nobody can reach.