I have a site with tons of pages I'm redesigning it. The main navigational links work perfectly and are user friendly, so I don't want to add more links there. I was thinking of adding a series of 5-7 internal links to other key pages (not found in navigation menu) in the footer. Is this good SEO? Or are SEs going to see it as internal spam?
Internal links are somewhat similar to inbound links. If you have... 100 Internal links pointing at homepage 90 pointing at main page 2 80 pointing at main page 3 Then google will rank your site like so Homepage is the most important page on this site page 2 is the second most important page on this site page 3 is the third Does this make sense?
Great! So the concept is to try to include your most important pages within your main navigation so they are on as many pages as possible.
Limit your footer links, if possible link to 'theme based pages only'. There is no harm in interlinking your pages with footer unless you have 100 links there ;-)
I put my major category links (ie main menu items) as footers; for small sites I sometimes also put submenu item links as well.
pjman, I will share the secret here, which is identified by Wikipedia and used very successfully (also by me): make interlinking from your textual content (not from footers or sidebars). Look through your articles and find out the words relevant to other your pages. Then make these words as anchortexts of the links to these pages. That requires some time, but it will work amazingly well for your SERP.
A 1000 Thanks George. Your right that is the stuff. I'm going to add it to all my SEO campaigns. Makes sure to at least throw two anchor text links per large post or article.
I always do this on all the sites I work on and it seems to bring good results. The way I see it is that it can't do any harm, so even if the impact it makes is minimal, its still worth doing as a best practice. With on-page SEO its the many little changes and tweaks we make that add up to a big change and can make all the difference.