Some of your linking partners will move your home page link to an internal page after their site becomes established, in which case you can drop all but one of your links to other site. It's still win-win because:

1 - You still have a quality inbound link in exchange for yours.

2 - During time it takes for other site to grow and build a solid rankings foundation in search engines, you're taking advantage of anchor text boost and traffic from home page link!

Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE Directory & Informational Resources. You can visit him at

If anchor tag is so important & more often that not, one cannot control what world says while linking to you then it is very useful to have internal links speak language of keywords. This means that it is a good practice to use keywords as internal linking text.

However if you are using Graphics/Image linking then you should not do it using image map because many of search engine does not follow image map. To overcome this problem make use of ALT attribute. ALT attribute give information about image and where it is going to provide link.

Another important aspect of internal linking of your site is sitemap. A sitemap is a page that contains links to every page on site. There should be a link to sitemap on every page, or at least on homepage. A sitemap helps you to have an overview of your site linking architecture as well as it helps SE crawl entire web site.

Internal linking architecture -----------------------------

There are three forms that can be assumed while planning sites internal linking pattern.

Hierarchal ----------

In this kind of Internal linking all pages of website are connected to home page and home page is individually connected to all pages of website, but there is no linking between pages of website.

Looping -------

In this kind of Internal linking home page is connected to primary page and primary page is connected to secondary page and this process goes on till last page and last page is connected to home page in this way a loop is formed.

Extensive inter linking -----------------------

In this kind of Internal linking each page is connected to each other in website.

What kind of internal linking is preferable in a certain case, is dependent on objectives you are trying to achieve in terms of Pagerank optimisation, user navigation ease & site theme.One tip to bear in mind is that internal linking should reinforce theme. One should not crosslink between pages on site which are unrelated by themes. This will dilute theme intensity & affect page rankings on SERPs.

Redundant Internal links: -------------------------

Two category of internal links that should be guarded against are: broken links & dead links.

Broken links ------------

Broken links are links that are in website and when they are clicked they don’t open a webpage rather they show some error.

Dead links ----------

Dead links are links that are in website and when they are clicked they don’t open a webpage and they don’t even show some error.

To summarize pagerank of a site apart from other factors, can be guided by way information is organised within a site & way it is presented. Careful planning with setting up information flow will go a long way in helping optimise pagerank of site.

Do let me know if you have any queries and I'll be happy to answer them for you. This article can be reprinted as long as resource box stays intact.

I'm an eBiz consultant and owner of Mosaic Services- an SEO Company. I regularly write and submit articles on various SE specific topics.