Internal Links - On Page SEO - How to Do it Right

One of the main reasons we do on page SEO is to communicate with the search engines. If you think of the code on your website page as being a conversation with Google, you can instruct the search engine to do what you want when it comes to indexing your website.

Internal linking is one important bit of conversation you can have with the search engine that will tell it exactly what keyword phrase you would like to be ranked for and which pages in your website are the most important. Here are a few guides to go by when creating your internal links.

Every page on your site should have a link to your main domain name. Linking to your main domain will tell Google that it is a very important page in the whole scheme of things.
Avoid naming your main page links as "home". Make the anchor text of the link your keyword. This will let the spiders crawling your site know that the keyword is important to the website because it is linked on every page.
Every page should also have a link to your Sitemap. This will ensure that the spider crawls through, and indexes, every page on your website. If you do not want the search engines to index a certain page, do not include it in your Sitemap.
When linking to your main domain name. Do not add extensions to it that are not necessary. ie: index.html.
If you use the www. in front of your domain name, make sure you do for ALL of your linking. Do not make some links with and some links without. The search engines see those as two separate destinations and you will not only water down the effect of the internal links, you will also create duplicate content in the search engine's eyes.
Create some deep links within your pages. Deep linking is when you link to any page within the site that is not the main page. Make these pages anchor text links to the appropriate related keywords.
If you follow these guides and create an internal linking system within your website, the search engines will not only index all of your pages, they will be indexed the way you want them to be. By having conversations with search spiders through your code, you will rank much higher in the SERP for your specific keyword phrases and get better performance from your website.