Internal linking

Michael Martinez at seo-theory.com often talks about how internal links are just as valuable as external ones. One article is here:
Internal Links versus External Links

When I first started trying to rank my pages in google, I did way more internal than external linking. (I was uncomfortable going to someone else's site and posting a self-serving comment.)

So, I did navigation linking where every other page linked to every other page. And I added a secondary level of navigation linking on every page, pointing to the most valuable pages. (For example, "related posts" and "most popular" and "most recent".)

And then, I did tons of contextual linking within the body of articles. I searched for keywords on all pages, and made them all hyperlinks to related internal pages. (Later I learned this works best if you vary the anchor text, and I probably didn't do that enough.)

All this internal linking happened before I started submitting articles to directories. My only backlinks were from a blogger blog I'd created on the side, and paying for 100 directory submissions which netted me about 10. Mostly I was adding content to my site, and linking it up internally.

All this was enough to earn me my first few clickbank sales. I'm sure traffic increased because I was adding content, but landings also increased for the older pages, and I attribute that to all my internal linking.

Patey88