Every new page deserves links from the old ones
Publishing a page is not enough: it is the links from your existing pages that get it discovered and give it its weight. The reflex to build into every publication. A quick win from the SEO series.
The fifth part of the series laid out the theory of internal linking: Google discovers pages by following links, and a page nothing points to only half exists. This quick win turns that into a routine, the one that keeps the problem from re-forming with every publication.
The reflex, in two steps
A new page arrives with its outgoing links: to the section it belongs to, to neighbouring pages, that much is natural and almost automatic. What does not happen by itself is the reverse path: the incoming links, from the pages that existed before it. Yet those are the ones that matter for discovery: the crawler regularly revisits your known pages, and it is by finding a fresh link there that it learns the new one exists.
Hence the reflex, to install in your publishing routine: every new page receives, the same day, two or three links from existing pages. Which ones? Those covering the same subject, first; and among them, the most visited, which your Search Console, introduced in the third part, lists in its performance report. One link from your most-read page is worth more than three links from pages nobody sees.
The link goes in the text, at the moment it helps
The good internal link is not a “related articles” block generated at the bottom of the page, it is a sentence in the text that, at the moment a neighbouring question surfaces, holds out the page that answers it, with anchor text that says where you are going: “how a bathroom renovation unfolds” rather than “click here”. Google’s guide recommends these descriptive anchors; the reader needs no recommendation, they simply click more on a link that announces its destination.
Twice a year, the reverse pass
The reflex at publication time maintains the network; it still needs revising from time to time. Twice a year, go back over the list of your pages and ask the fifth part’s questions: what points to this page, what does it point to, how many clicks from the home page. Sales pages and the oldest pages are the ones that drift most: the former because nobody dares touch them, the latter because they get forgotten. An hour of links added inside existing texts is, along with renaming images, one of the least technical and most profitable jobs in all of SEO.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.