Share PageRank with Internal Linking

Any given website is most likely going to have a few pages that bring in most of the traffic for the website. These pages are the cream of the crop that are linked to frequently by other sites because they provide something new, useful, popular, or entertaining. Search Engines see those links and figure that if the page has so many links it must be valuable to users so it should be placed at or near the top of the search results. Let's consider these pages as the freeways that lead to your site because they bring the most traffic. The other pages on the site might get some traffic from the search engines but usually these pages can be considered to be the same as small roads. While there is traffic on the small roads it doesn't compare to the traffic on the freeway. See the image below:

The diagram above represents a poorly linked site. All the roads are bringing traffic to the site independently because they do not share traffic at all. Building your site as in the diagram above would be the same as building an amusement park where you cannot walk from ride to ride but instead you have to leave the park and find another entrance that leads to the next ride. There may be another page that would be helpful to the user because it relates to the first page they visited at your site but they won't know about it unless they navigate to the homepage and try to find the related page using your links. This is most likely not going to happen because they don't even know if you have a related page on your site. The way to fix this problem is to have a link or multiple links on every content page of your site that link to other pages on your site that are related. The benefits of doing this are many, see the following list:

• If a user finishes reading a page and wants to read more on the same topic the relevant links will help them do so.
• If a user finds your page but it's not quite what they are looking for they may see the relevant links and find exactly what they are looking for.
• The number of pages a user looks at during each visit will increase. In this way you are keeping the user on your site longer which makes it a more memorable experience for them.
• Any PageRank that the article has will be passed on in some degree to the linked pages.
• Overall, you are providing value to your users and the search engines because you are showing them other information that relates to the current page that they might like.

Now, examine the diagram below:

This diagram shows the same site with some relevant linking going on. While there are probably more relevant links that could be established throughout the site this is a great start. As you can see from the diagonal roads, some of the traffic from the freeways is being diverted to the smaller roads. This is a great way to leverage your site's traffic and increase traffic to pages that didn't get as much traffic as before. It will also boost the PageRank of the lesser pages so they have a better chance of ranking well in the search engines.

When implementing the relevant links there are a few things to be aware of such as the following:

• Be sure to only link to relevant pages that will help your visitors or else they might get annoyed. If you have a page about armadillos and you link to a page about pretzels your visitors and the search engines are going to be confused and the amount of PageRank passed to the page will most likely be minimal.
• When linking to the relevant pages use keywords in the anchor text that are targeted by the relevant page. This should help to boost the page's PageRank.
• Don't overuse relevant links. Too many links on a page can be interpreted badly by the search engines.

Now go out and apply this knowledge to your sites and watch your PageRank and traffic numbers grow.