How an internal link works
An internal link points from one page on your domain to another page on the same domain. A crawler that arrives on any page follows the links it finds there, and that is how the rest of the site gets discovered. A page nobody links to can still exist and still be in a sitemap, but it is being reached the hard way, and search engines tend to treat it as less important because the site itself never points at it.
Two other things travel along the link. The first is the anchor text, which describes the destination in the words of the page doing the linking. The second is ranking value passed from the linking page, which is why a link from a page that attracts attention is worth more than one from a page nobody visits.
Why internal links matter
They are the only links you control completely. Nobody has to agree, nothing has to be earned, and no budget is needed. For a small business — and for most sites in Nepal, where a domain may have very few links from elsewhere — internal linking is often the single largest improvement available, because it is the one lever that does not depend on anyone else.
They also decide what your site says its own priorities are. If the service you most want to sell is reachable only from a dropdown menu, while a blog post from two seasons ago is linked from every page, the structure is arguing against you. Links placed inside body copy carry more meaning than links repeated in a template, because they are chosen for that specific sentence.
Common mistakes with internal links
Vague anchors are the everyday one. Text like read more or find out here describes nothing, so the link stops being useful to a search engine and to anyone scanning the page. The opposite failure is linking the same phrase to the same page from every mention, which reads as automated rather than editorial.
The structural mistake is relying on navigation alone. Menus link a handful of pages and leave everything deeper than that stranded, producing pages with no inbound link from anywhere on the site. Links hidden inside a tab, an accordion or a script that only runs on interaction are also weaker than plain links in the page, because they may not be present when the page is fetched.
How to act on it
Start by finding pages nothing points to, then decide for each whether it deserves a link or deserves deleting. Next, pick the handful of pages that actually earn money and check what links to them: adding sensible links from your strongest, most-visited pages moves more than adding links everywhere.
Write the anchor as the phrase you would use to describe the destination to a colleague, and place links where a reader would genuinely want them — mid-paragraph, at the moment the question arises, not stacked in a related list at the bottom. Treat the whole exercise as ordinary on-page SEO maintenance rather than a one-off campaign.