Internal Links

The general feeling is that you get less credit for links from within your own site rather than links that come from external sites, but this doesn't mean you should neglect internal links. After all, internal links are the easiest to get. The first thing is to make sure you link to as many of your pages as possible from your home page. If you can't fit more links in your navigation menu, put some extra links on the bottom of the page. The idea is that you want as few "hops" as possible to get to all your pages. If a user (or Googlebot) has to go from your Home Page Category Page Article Page, that's two hops, or "two-deep". PR is being passed down the chain, and gets weaker as it wends its way down. The Home Page gives a little PR to the Category Page, and then the Category Page gives a little of what IT has to the Article Page. If you have fewer hops then the pages get more PR passed to them.

Some people confuse hops with directories. They think that domain.com/subdir/file.html is bad because it's too far from the home page. But it doesn't matter how far down the file tree a file is, what matters is how many clicks it takes to get to it. If the home page links directly to the page mentioned above then it's just one hop, which is as good as you can get.

Each and every page in your site should link back to the home page, as well as to a handful of the most important pages on the site, and also to pages related to the page in question.

If you have navigation links in Java script or Flash, make sure you also have links in plain HTML so the engines can see those links.