Forget about linking all your pages together equally...
Precision Guided Linking is Key to Top Results on Google
– by Leslie Rohde

Getting top position at Google depends almost entirely on two factors – link reputation and PageRank (PR). The impact of link reputation has been discussed a number of times within this publication (see: Feb'03 & Sept'02 articles). Rather than cover old ground, this article will focus on PR and how it can be controlled through advanced, and very precise, linking techniques.

First, one should bear in mind that, used incorrectly, these advanced linking techniques can create a positioning disaster – hence the standard advice to avoid their use. But, when used with an understanding of how Google actually works, the advanced linking approach shown here provides an incredible ranking advantage.

Three Kinds of Links

Functionally, a link is a way to get from one page to another. The most basic type of link is one we are all familiar with and looks something like this:

<a href="path to page">link text</a>

We'll call this a text link. As we'll see, this is the most important form of linking for search engine purposes, but by no means is it the only choice available. There are two other types of links that we may employ.

The next type, and closely related to the text link, is the image link. This is composed of an HTML <a href=> tag just like the text link, but instead of link text an <img> tag is used like so:

<a href="path to page"><img src="picture file" alt="some text"></a>

This type of link is often used instead of a text link be...