The Deep Linking Pass

Why internal links matter

Search engines use links to understand relationships. LLMs use links to build context. Visitors use links to discover more.

A page with zero inbound links is invisible. A page with ten inbound links from related content is an authority node. Same content. Different discoverability.

Most sites build pages and forget to connect them. The content exists but nobody finds it because there's no path between it and everything else.

The architecture before

Here's what the site looked like before the linking pass:

Homepage
├── Visuals (grid)
├── Courses (3 featured)
├── Reviews (masonry)
└── Prints (grid)

/learn ──→ individual courses ──→ lessons
/art ──→ individual projects
/visuals ──→ individual visuals
/tools ──→ external links only
/workflows ──→ (didn't exist)
/blogs ──→ articles ──→ related articles

No cross-links between sections.

Courses didn't link to visuals. Visuals didn't link to courses. Tools didn't link to anything on the site. The about page linked to old /projects URLs. The membership page mentioned tools but didn't link to them. Reviews showed on pages but didn't link to the reviews page.

Isolated islands of content.