External links give page rank

One of the major ways Search Engines rank pages on your web site, is by the number of external links to your web pages. An external link is a vote of confidence in the quality of that page.

One of the main activities you should engage in as a webmaster with an interest in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is gaining links to your pages.

Most links will be to your home page

Most of the links you gain for your site, will probably not link to individual pages, but to your home page. This leads to the question as to how pages that are not directly linked will be judged by Search Engines?

A rule of thumb with the Google page rank system, is that 1 page rank point will be deducted from every link a page is away from an externally linked page. There are complexities here of course and algorithms change, but the message is clear all the same.

You want as many pages on your site as possible linked closely to your top ranked page, which will probably be your home page.

Use a site Map

Having vast numbers of links on your home page though is not advisable, it will not aid human navigation of your site and Search Engines down rate pages with too many links. How many is too many? Well opinions and Search Engines differ on this point. We tend to the view that what is good for human navigation is what you should aim at.

The compromise solution between vast numbers of links on the home page and not losing too much rank, is a site map linked from the home page.

The site map page does contain vast numbers of links to all of your site, but you do not care about the ranking of this page itself, you merely want it to act as a conduit for the Search Engines to transfer page ranking from the externally linked home page.