Internal links are one of the few signals you fully control. External links have to be earned from other people; internal links are twenty decisions you could make this afternoon.
Volume is not the goal, though. An internal link does two jobs at once, and both depend on how you place it.
The two jobs a link does
The first is guidance. When a reader hits the point where they think “I would like to know more about that”, a link to exactly that article keeps the visit going. The test here is human, not algorithmic: is this genuinely where curiosity appears?
The second is declaring a relationship. When A links to B, that marks B as an important page for the subject. You are stating, in your own site, where the centre of a topic is. It is why pillar pages grow in weight — their clusters keep pointing at them.
Anchor text — what “click here” throws away
The words you wrap a link in are its anchor text, and that is the slot where you explain what the destination is about. “Click here” and “read more” leave that slot entirely empty.
Overcorrecting is its own problem. Repeating the identical keyword phrase twenty times, word for word, reads badly and looks contrived. Describe the destination within a sentence that still reads naturally, and stop there.
Accessibility points the same way. Screen reader users frequently pull up a list of links on their own; a list of ten identical “click here” entries carries no information at all.
Direction — up and down always, sideways sometimes
Cluster-to-cluster links earn their place when there is a reading order. In a series, linking the previous and next parts genuinely helps. Forcing unrelated posts together under a “related” heading does the opposite: nobody clicks, and the relationship you were declaring gets muddier.
Two habits that keep it working
Internal linking usually decays for one reason: links only get added at publication. A new post can point at old ones, but old posts cannot point at articles that did not exist yet. Over time everything flows one way.
Two rules in your publishing routine remove that. ① When you publish, add the new post to its pillar. ② Open one or two older posts on the same subject and link forward to the new one. Five minutes per article, and it is what compounds into a hub.
We place links on this site by the same rules — every article points at its subject archive and at neighbouring pieces. Related articles are gathered in the SEO archive, and if the restructure should come with the performance and security work attached, our optimization program covers that scope as one job.
Next part
Links converge on archives — and archive pages usually contain no writing at all. The next part is the archive introduction, and what happens to a page that is nothing but a list.