Internal links are the cheapest SEO you are not doing

Every page on your site casts a vote. Internal links tell Google which of your own pages you consider important, and unlike everything else in link building, you control all of them.

They require no outreach, no relationships, no budget, and no permission. Which is presumably why they are so consistently neglected.

What they actually do

They distribute authority. Whatever ranking strength a page has accumulated, it passes some onward through its links. A strong page linking to a weak one lends it something.

They establish importance. A page linked from twenty places is evidently more central than one linked from the footer only.

They provide context. The anchor text tells Google what the destination is about, in your words, from a page it already trusts.

They get pages discovered. A page with no internal links is reachable only from the sitemap, which is a weaker signal than it sounds.

The orphan problem

Most sites have orphan pages — reachable by URL, linked from nowhere. They accumulate through migrations, campaign landing pages, and content published outside the normal navigation.

Finding them requires comparing your sitemap against a crawl. Anything in the sitemap that the crawl never reached by following links is an orphan, and the fix is one link from somewhere relevant.

The practical routine

Take your top ten pages by impressions. For each, ask: which other page on this site would a reader of this one want next? Link to it, from within the text, with anchor text that describes the destination.

Then take your priority pages — the ones you want to rank and do not — and count how many internal links point at them. If the answer is two, and both are in the footer, that is your finding.

Anchor text, briefly

Descriptive, varied, and honest. "Read more" and "click here" tell Google nothing. Exact-match anchor text on every single link looks manipulative and stops helping.

Write the sentence first, then link the words in it that describe the destination. That produces natural variety without any strategy at all.

Where to put them

In the body text, not in a related-links widget at the bottom. Links inside prose are followed more, weighted more, and read as editorial rather than automated. A block of twelve auto-generated links carries very little.