Pyramid Effect Of Internal Links

While we will be discussing PageRank (a Google-based term) here; the same rules generally apply for the other engines. The closer a page is in clicks from your homepage, the higher the value (or PageRank) the page is assigned. Basically, if you have a page linked to from your homepage it will be given more weight that a page that is four or five levels deep in your site.

This does not mean that you should link to all of your pages from your homepage. Not only does this diffuse the weight of each individual link but it will look incredibly unattractive if your site is significantly large.

Figure out what your main phrases are and which pages will be used to rank for them and be sure to include text links to these internal pages on your homepage. It is important to pick solid pages to target keyword phrases on, as you don't want human visitors going to your "terms and conditions" page before they've even seen the products.

If that hosting company noted above has a PageRank 6 homepage, the pages linked from its homepage will generally be a PageRank 5 (sometimes 4, sometimes 6 depending on the weight of the 6 for the homepage). Regardless, it will be significantly higher than if that page was linked to from a PageRank 3 internal page.