I have never had much luck getting a page indexed high on search phrases unless it is one click away from my home page. Is this a common problem? My current page structure is: The index page leads to a "News and Views" page which has a brief write up on what each additional page holds and contains links to ALL SUBSEQUENT pages. The site is now positioning in the top five for the desired targeted phrases. Now I want to start putting up additional pages to get more visibility and increase my ranking on certain local city searches for real estate. If I continue the present format all of these new pages will be 3 clicks from the home page. Will this cause a problem with search engine visibility if the KW density and content is "first class"? Should I back up and revise my template so I can add links to the bottom of all of my pages, including the index page?
You should have content on ALL pages. Your not going to rank in SERPs for one page if all your backlinks are to another. You need backlinks to all your webpages, and use in the anchor text the keyword or keyphrase you want to rank for, this is the best start-up advice i can give.
But I want it right when I load the homepage! I try my best to interlink all my content, most of my sites have all content less than 2 pages away. I believe well internal linking and structure might be a key in sitelinks.
You have totally missed my point - reader access was NOT mentioned in my question. My goal is for the ENGINES to find and iINDEX the pages. If this happens readers will not have to search my site for the requested information, it will be the page the engines return for the specific search. In simple words, if someone searches for "what color are purple peanuts", I want my "http://www.XYZ.com/whatcolorarepeanuts/purplepeanuts.html" to be the page returned by the engines. I am interested in how the engines see pages that are 3-4 clicks away from the INDEX page. Will the engines rank pages that are 3-4 deep or should the pages by ONE click away from the INDEX page.
The more time search bots takes to reach the actual content, the lesser it will become interested to stay back in your website, the lesser it stays the lesser it indexes and you know the rest of the story.....of course other optimisation techniques can boost it up but when the keyword you are competing is very competitive then these are the little pieces of the jigsaw which may be missing in the whole puzzle
Create an XML Sitemap and robots.txt file, then submit the sitemap to Google webmasters central, also I always place a link to my XML sitemap on my top page.