Internal linking
Links from your own pages to your other pages. How crawlers find things, and how ranking value moves around your site.
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What it is
Internal linking is every link that goes from one page on your site to another: navigation, breadcrumbs, footers, related-post modules, and most importantly links inside the body copy. It does three jobs at once. It gives crawlers a path to pages they would otherwise never find, it spreads ranking value (link equity) from your strong pages to your weak ones, and its anchor text tells search engines what the destination is about.
Reach for it when a page is orphaned (nothing links to it), buried (five clicks from the homepage), or brand new and needs a boost from an established page. The workhorse pattern is the topic cluster: one hub page covering a subject broadly, several deeper pages around it, each spoke linking back to the hub and sideways to its siblings. Write anchor text that names the destination ('sourdough starter guide', not 'click here', not the raw URL).
Two gotchas. Links have to be real <a href> elements in the HTML: a div with an onClick handler, or a button that calls router.push, is invisible to a crawler no matter how well it works for humans. And linking everything to everything defeats the point. A footer stuffed with 200 site-wide links flattens the signal, since the pages you actually care about get the same emphasis as everything else.
Ask AI for it
Improve internal linking across this content site. Build a hub and spoke structure: for each topic, add a pillar page that links out to every supporting article, and add a link back to the pillar from each article. Insert contextual links inside the body copy where a related page is genuinely relevant, using descriptive anchor text that names the destination topic rather than 'read more' or 'click here'. Render every link as a real <a href> with an absolute or root-relative URL, never a click handler. Then list any page with zero inbound internal links, plus any page more than three clicks from the homepage, so both can be linked from somewhere relevant.