As a webmaster your goal is to connect all pages together, so the search engines can crawl and index every page of your website quickly and easily, and to obtain the highest page rank for your index or home page.

The google ‘bot’, if it follows a link through to your site - and this is the best way to get your site crawled, will index your home page on it’s first visit. On the next visit it must be able to reach all of your pages with one hop. This makes it easier for the google spider and so gets your site indexed quicker.

So, how can you achieve a maximum of one hop between every page? The solution is simple. Let’s assume you have 5 main topics and each main topic has 3 sub topics. So the site is 3 layers deep; home page, topic pages and sub topic pages.

On the home page create 5 text links (don’t use JavaScript menu links, search engines cannot follow them) to each topic page. On the topic pages create 3 text links to each sub topic page. On every page link to a site map page. On the site map is a link and short description of every page on your site. The site map also links to the home page. Home page links to the site map.

So, it doesn’t matter what page the google ‘bot’ lands on, it can get to any page with just one hop. And google loves site maps because it helps the search engine crawl a site easily. See how to create a site map to learn more about google and how it loves site maps.

Once you have created your links, make sure you use the primary page keyword as your anchor text. What do I mean by this? If your site is about dog breeds and your topic pages are about, spaniels, terriers, hounds, bulldogs and poodles, your text links to these pages should be these keywords.

Before the google ‘bot’ has even landed on your ‘terrier’ page, it know the page is about terriers from the anchor text. This techniques will increase the page rank of the ‘terrier’ web page. It all helps feed page rank back to the site map and your home page.

This strategy works because it’s how search engines work.

If you are inspired and want to learn more I can recommend Revenge of the mininet by Michael Campbell and Dynamic linking by Leslie Rohde. Both are free downloadable ebooks.