Could someone experienced in SEO give me some advice? I have read somewhere that to help your home page obtain better ranking, that the internal pages should link back to it. Does this mean NAV bar, or does it mean to use keyword phrases links, or does it mean to use the actual http://www. link? I am new to this world of SEO and am trying to boost the Google PR. I would really appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.
Personally, I would have a link in you nav pointing back to the index page of your site. Probabally using the anchor text "home"... From a usability point of view, If you have a logo in the top left of the site, I'd link that to the index page too. links to "http://www.yourdomain.com" are perfect.
basic & simple is every page should not be more than two clicks from anywhere. - easiest way to achive this is a site map BUT also think about your real visitors when generating one. When a site matures not all visitors will start on the site by comming through the home or hub page. - thus a link from each and every page to the initial home page is "expected" Users will mouse over a logo or the title if they do not find the obligatory HOME button. "home" is not a very usefull anchor text in a link (anchor is the bit between a & /a. A nice way to replace Home is using a graphic instead where you can set the alt / title tag to what you need. E.G. HOME (gif) alt="The master page about blue widgets" But this you only need to do if for example your logo which is usually first item on a page is not an active link. If it is don't forget to set the alt and/or title tag. Best of luck M
Tax Man: Most smaller sites of 10 or 20 pages use fully meshed linking. That means all pages are linked to all pages. This is normal and fine. Now the total site PR is the number of pages. So if you have a site with 30 pages the total site PR is 30. If you use fully meshed linking all pages will retain there PR value of 1 as far as internal linking goes. If you want to move PR from other pages and concentrate your PR to one page there are a number of ways to do this. You can have a Articles page with say 12 links to 12 articles on that page. If you don't fully mesh these 12 links but link them back to the article page you are moving the PR from those 12 pages to the article page. The 12 Pages Links Back to the Article Page diagram gives you an idea of how it concentrates PR to the Article page. Take a look at the Page Rank Calculator and test a few things out. If you have further questions after you look at the Grid Calculator post them there and some one will try to give you a hand.
You could play with that tool all day. It's useful, to quickly try out alternative linking strategies, but, in your experience, do it's calculations accurately predict the PR of real websites? For example, I tried out a strategy based on a 26 page website, and I was able to calculate the home page as a PR9. If that would really happen, I'll start a new website today.
nadlay: The numbers are way out with out a doubt. Common sense tells us that. When I orginally found the Page Rank Grid Calculator some time back I played with it and quickly realized that as you have also. I read those the text below the tool and read "The calculations assume that their initial PRs don't change through the iterations, which is unrealistic, so our sites resulting PR tends to be unrealistically high. They can be used to determine which internal pages are the best to link to but the resulting figures should be taken with a rather large pinch of salt." I kind of thought, whatever the numbers are out for some reason and passed over it. When I took another look at it today I noticed that the above quote was applied by Phil Craven to the what happens when you check Inbound links (i1 - i4). I have sent an email to Phil Craven pointing out that if you have a 6 page fully meshed link structure and you add 20 article pages to the home page and link them back only to the home page that the home page ends up with a PR of 9.3. Example on Phil Craven's Page Rank Grid Calculator (If you are using IE give it 30 secs to load, work best in Firefox, and Moz and NS it doesn't work some times) showing how to get a PR of 9.3 by adding 20 pages to your home page with them linking back to only the home page. I will post his answer back.
The numbers that the PageRank Calculator produces indicate the PageRank share that each page gets. They are nothing to do with actual PageRank. It says that on the calculator page Bob. I don't usually reply to emails like that, or I'd be spending far too much time doing it. The Contact pages says that, and it suggests posting the questions in the forum, as they, and their answers, are likely to be of interest to other people.
PhiC: Fine I will pick this conversation up over in the fourm. And by the way your calculator pages says "The results produced by the calculator are related to actual (raw) PageRank." Also the your article that is listed on your calculator form for more information has at the end "Comments and suggestions Comments and suggestions are welcomed. Please email me if you have any" and there is nothing on the calculator page than says to ask the questions in the forum.
Internal linking is an important thing for SEO. One should use keyword is the anchor text within a website. Keyword in anchor text is also good for SEO.
Hyper linking of your keywords is the good idea. You can also use the breadcrumb navigation. This is useful for the SEO.