The pages on your site that you are most likely to link to and the pages others’ are likely to link to are completely different.
If you have a page on your website that is starting to get links, the likelihood that that page will rank in Google starts to increase. To oversimplify, whether the links come from other pages on your website or from other places on the web, doesn’t matter.
For one, you have a navigation. Most people have an About, Services, Blog, Contact page linked in their menu bar. But this means that every page on your website will link to those pages.
Weirdly counterintuitive, but also super sensical.
As people we do this. When a comedian tells a new joke, they don’t know how it’s going to land. When you hit “Send” you don’t know how it’s going to land.
Meanwhile, at some point you write something that resonates with people deeply and then it’s revealed. Now you do know. At least for that piece. And at some point, you start becoming known for those pieces. They’re the ones that “get around,” what’s most likely to be shared.
Maybe you accumulate a few of these assets often called “top of funnel” content.
What’s interesting to me about all that though is we still structure our sites like big corporations, “Contact Us.” “About.” We do this even when we already have clear indications of the most impactful or resonant content.
Okay from a search standpoint it doesn’t really matter. Google knows to devalue any page linked from all other pages on your site for topics unrelated to transactional or navigational intent.
And people know that too. As users we’re used to having to hunt around for what we want.
But at the very least you should have a “Best Articles” or “Start Here” (BASH) nav item. These do extraordinarily well compared to other nav items as a portion of clicks.
Of course, it’s not a competition. But if it were, the BASH buttons would trash your “Blog” or “Contact” items.
“Start Here” forces you to decide how you want to organize your subject matter for those new to your content. You have to suspend as best you can the curse of knowledge, channel your beginners’ mind.
“Best Articles” can be a quick one and done of your most popular, commented, trafficked, shared, linked to, or some combination.
If you want to get a little tactical, you look for the content that should be performing, not what you think should be performing, but what used to get more traffic and do well for email signups, or what’s ranking in the top 10 but not top 3 on Google for terms you care about. Give it a bump and watch traffic 5x.
If you want to get even more tactical, you can chop up a “Best Articles” page into sections. DON’T link to your default category archives. Make those “sections” simply headings. If you write about work performance but don’t have a hub page on work performance, put your top work performance articles in a list under a heading called, “Work Performance.”
No need to overthink it. You can see good examples working well on these sites:
Articles referencing this one