How does interlinking within a content hub contribute to SEO performance, & what strategies should be employed?

Interlinking (internal linking) plays a really important role in your overall SEO performance when you have a larger content hub or section on your site. Properly linking those related pages together contributes to better crawlability, topical relevance signals, and distributing link equity in a few key ways:

First, it helps search engines understand the clear hierarchy and structure of your content hub by how you organize and link between categories and subcategories. Using descriptive anchor text for those internal links reinforces the context of how pages relate to each other topically.

You'll also want to prioritize linking to your most important pillar pages and linking from high-authority pages to less authoritative ones. This allows you to strategically distribute link equity, which is a major ranking factor, throughout the hub.

Linking between supporting and complementary content pieces signals their relevance around certain topics or subject clusters. So creating these logical content groups through your internal linking can solidify your expertise on specific themes.

Proper interlinking makes it easier for search crawlers to discover and index all your content too. Things like XML sitemaps, a flat architecture with streamlined navigation, and fixing any broken links all contribute to efficient crawling within the hub.

You can even facilitate a better user experience by using breadcrumb navigation, which also conveniently reinforces the parent-child relationship between pages for crawlers.

And of course, as your content hub expands over time, consistently monitoring and updating internal links keeps everything well-connected and free of disruptions.

So in short, strategic interlinking improves content discoverability, establishes context and relevance around topics, allows you to control link equity flow, and just makes it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand all components of your content hub. It's a crucial piece of a strong SEO strategy.