to from all other pages in the site, but not all pages cross-link between each other. This concentrates PageRank on your most important pages.

Most sites should use a hierarchical linking structure, whereby the home page and
the most important product, service, or content pages are linked to more often than
other pages are. In this way, you can increase the chance that your most important
page is ranked the highest on Google for your most important keyword phrase. The
following figure illustrates this concept.



                                   PR=6 Home
                                         page
                                             link
                                             link




             PR=5 Product            PR=5 Product 1                  About Us
                                                               PR=4 page
                   main page               page
                       link                     link                     link
                       link                     link




       Hierarchical linking – only important page(s) get links from every other page


The home page typically has the highest PR value as this is the page most often
linked to, both externally and internally. This may not be ideal if your home page is
nothing but a splash page or contains little content. In this case, you should redesign
your home page to include more content and make it more relevant to Google (and
to your visitors). If this is not possible, you should re-link internally to your most
important keyword-relevant content page(s).

In the preceding figure, the About Us page is only linked to from a single page. This
is because the About Us page is not nearly as the other pages. So why funnel
precious PR value to it – instead flow PR value out of the page back to the home
page.

Mesh linking
Mesh linking is where all pages are considered equally important (to theme, topic,
and keywords). This is the simplest linking method in that each page on the site links
to every other page on the site. Most sites use mesh linking by default without




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thinking about it by virtue of having the same menu navigation bar on each page that
contains the same links. This evenly distributes PageRank among all pages in the
site, which is not ideal. The following figure illustrates this concept.



                  PR=5 Home                  PR=5 Products
                        page                       main page
                            link                       link
                            link                       link
                            link                       link




                  PR=5 Product 1             PR=5 About Us
                        page                       page
                            link                       link
                            link                       link
                            link                       link



                  Mesh linking – each page links to every other page


In this example, note that each page links to the lesser important About Us page. So
why funnel precious PR value to it? Use hierarchical linking whenever possible!


Best Practices for Internal Linking

The following are best practices for linking the pages of your site together:


1. Use text-based links if possible and use the proper link structure.


2. Use keywords in your link text for every link.

Part of the ranking algorithm includes checking the text of a link against text on the
linked-to page. Use your keywords in link text.

Don’t use “Click here” or “Home” as the text of a link, as these are not relevant.