The internal link structure
and directory structure of your pages is very
important. There is only so much stuff that you
can fit on the home page. Especially if you cover
a range of topics. You may find that a deep page
in your site is more keyword rich than you front
page and so would rank highly if only it had
some PR down there. Well you can use your internal
link structure to adjust the PR of such deep
pages.
Such quality pages rank badly cause most people dump all their link popularity
onto the home page. The only links to the deep pages are via the internal links
of the site. So all the deep pages have just one good referrer (the home page).
You can get google to go deeper into your site by getting some other sites to
link to some of your deep page. This creates more PR hot spots on your site.
You can then play with the link relationships between these hot spots and you
other pages. Doing so can bring some pages to the fore front while others hang
behind.
If you simply want to make every page equally popular, then you should use the
simple "every page links to every page" method. This is easy with a small site
cause you can fit all the links into a nice tidy menu. Another method that has
the same effect is to have the home page link to every page and then every page
links back to the home page. Assuming your directory structure is the same depth
for each page then each page will get an equal share of the PR.
But sometimes you don't want every page to get the same PR. You may want to downgrade
some pages such as you "contact us" page. Would just be a waste of PR to have
a high ranking page for your email address. Another (rather cruel) use would
be to lower the PR your links page for link exchanges. So that you don't leek
PR to them too much.
To do this you just reduce the number of links to the page to be downgraded.
So if you have every page linking to each other but the "contact us" link only
appears on the deep pages, not on the home page. This reduction in the number
of links to the downgraded page will result in less PR going to that page plus
since the page is not linked to off a high PR page like the home page but rather
off other deep pages, it get's an even smaller PR yet again.
Another way to adjust the flow of PR is the position of the links within a page.
Links at the top of the page's html will get more PR through them than links
at the bottom of the html. In a tabled layout, the left column is usually at
the top of the html while the right column is a the bottom. So links put on a
left hand menu will get more importance than links placed on a right hand menu.
So links to important pages go to the left and unimportant links go to the right.
You can also use markup to show importance and unimportance of some links to
others. Putting a link inside <em>, <b> <i> or <h1> tags
will mark it out as more important than normal. In the reverse, wrapping a link
inside <font size="1"> tags will make them less relevant to the SE spider.
(Yeh I know font tags are bad, but spiders don't read css yet and sometimes bad
can be good.)
There is a obvious problem here though. If you reduce the number of links to
a page, how are your users supposed to find it? Well good question. One solution
would be to use another form of link such as javascript or even flash. This would
allow users to follow the link but would be invisible to the search engine spiders.
But do remember that these have usability and accessibility issue of there own.
Many people browse with javascript turned off, not just spiders.
I'm sure by now you will have got that the more links you put between pages,
the more PR is spread about. The less links you use, the less PR you spread.
This allows you to concentrate PR onto the more important sections of your site.
It also allows you to reduce the PR of less important sections.
Things get more complex for large sites. It becomes impossible to have every
page linked to from the home page. The menu would be huge. Many people use dhtml
menus for this size of site but such menus use javascript which search engines
can navigate. So an alternative link structure has to be created for the search
engines. This is where you can get creative. Since you have a large number of
pages and so a large number of links to play with. A good place to start is to
draw a site map of your pages and link structure on a big sheet of paper. You
can then try to guess how the PR flows form one section to another. Decide which
sections will need PR and which wont. Also which sections will get PR form external
deep links and which will not. They try it out. You can always change things
again later on.
