Technical SEO
How to audit your internal links
Crawl the site, count inbound internal links per page, and compare that against which pages you actually want to rank. Most sites discover their commercial pages have fewer internal links than a blog post nobody reads.
Before you start
- A crawler that reports inbound link counts
The steps
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Step 1: Crawl the whole site
Internal links only, starting from the home page.
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Step 2: Export inbound link counts
How many internal pages link to each URL.
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Step 3: List your priority pages
The pages that make money, in order.
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Step 4: Compare the two lists
Priority pages with few inbound links are the gap worth closing.
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Step 5: Check anchor text
Look for pages linked only as "click here" or "read more", which describe nothing.
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Step 6: Add links from relevant content
From within body copy rather than navigation, using anchor text that describes the destination.
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Step 7: Re-crawl to confirm
Verify the links exist in the built output, not only in the source you edited.
What good looks like
Every page reachable within three clicks of the home page. Commercial pages linked from relevant content rather than only from navigation. Anchor text that describes the destination and varies naturally rather than repeating one phrase site-wide.
The accessibility overlap
Screen reader users can list every link on a page and navigate by it. A page whose links all say "read more" is unusable that way, which makes descriptive anchor text an accessibility requirement as well as a ranking signal.
The links worth adding first
Start with your highest-traffic informational pages and link from them to the commercial page they most naturally relate to. Those pages already have attention and authority, and they are usually linking nowhere useful. One well-placed link from a guide that earns 200 visits a month is worth more than twenty links added to a footer, because it is read in context by someone already interested in the subject.
The background behind this
Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers the reasoning in about 4 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.