Homepage Linking & Navigation
Once you have learned how to organize the content on your site you need know a little bit about how to internally link your pages together. Above all else, you want to make things easy on your users so set up your navigation to make it easy for them to get where they want to go.
With this article I am going to focus on linking for the search engine spiders. You will be designing your link structure to get more of your pages indexed and to focus more link juice on your main pages.
When you are trying to build up your important pages there are two things to consider: limit the number of outgoing links on that page and increase the number of pages linking in to that page. Here are four ways to do that.
1. Combine Your Overhead Pages
Every site has some standard fluff pages that they need to include but do not need to show up in the search engine rankings. These can include a privacy policy, terms of service, contact us, earnings disclaimer, etc. Instead of wasting valuable link juice pointing to an individual page for each, create a single page with all of this information and use named anchors to point users directly to the specific section they are looking for. In my PageRank sculpting article I describe in detail how this is done.
2. Control Your Outbound Links
The last thing I want you to do is create a site that is a "black hole." These are sites that link juice enters but can never, ever escape because the site will never link to anyone else. You should freely link to other sites that provide valuable information to your readers.
What I am suggesting is that you avoid linking to other sites from your homepage, category, tag, and archive pages (the pages you are driving a lot of link juice to). It's easy to take the links out of your summaries (the short versions of your post that display on these pages). This will keep your PageRank flowing to your own internal content while also allowing you to link out freely from inside of your articles.
3. Use a SiteMap Wisely
I use an archive page that links to all of my categories and sub-categories. If your category archives are large enough where you have several pages of archives, you want to link to each of these pages from your sitemap. This ensures that every piece of content on your site is only three clicks away from the hompage. By linking to the sitemap from my homepage it increases the chances that the spiders will crawl every single page of my site, leaving no piece of content so far from the homepage that it is forgotten by the spiders.
You should limit the number of links on this page to 100. The search engines don't crawl an infinite number of outgoing links on a page, they normally cut it off around 100 so if you have a large number of categories, create additional sitemap pages.
4. Limit Global Navigation Links
Most sites have some sort of global navigation menu. This menu is the same on every single page of the site. If you are going to have one of these, you want to limit the number of links in the menu as much as possible. This conserves pagerank on every page of the site and pushes more to the few pages you link to from the menu.
Another tactic you can use is to change the navigation as users dive deeper into the site. For example, on this site if someone clicks on the "Search Engine Marketing" category and then clicks through to a piece of content, the menu changes from what's on the homepage to my "SEO" menu listing the important pieces of SEO content I have written.