Internal links are the one ranking lever entirely under your control: they distribute the authority external links bring in, they tell crawlers which pages exist and matter, and they describe the target through anchor text. A page no internal link reaches is invisible twice over — hard to crawl and unsupported. The classic failure is a flat site where everything links to home and nothing links sideways.
The practice that works: links inside body copy where they genuinely help the reader (a service page linking the case study that proves it, an article linking the definition it uses), hubs that list depth rather than every page, and descriptive anchors — 'the prompt-injection playbook' teaches the engine what the target is; 'click here' teaches it nothing. Every related-content block on this site is this mechanism made visible.
Related terms
Anchor text
The clickable words of a link — a description of the destination that search engines read as a relevance vote.
Topical authority
Being the site that covers a subject completely — many well-linked pages on one topic beat one page on many topics.
Crawl budget
How much of your site Googlebot is willing to fetch — only a constraint on large sites, but a real one there.
SEO
Search engine optimization — making pages findable, indexable and worth ranking: technical health plus content people actually want.
The bench this belongs to
Web performanceA rebuild that loads on a phone on mobile data, in the country your customers are actually in. Core Web Vitals are the measurement, revenue is the point.
