I’ve been playing with a tool called Linkscape a lot recently; although it costs money, it provides some fascinating insights into your website, and it’s the sort of tool which is essential if you’re undertaking any “search engine optimisation” (aka “get my site ranking better in Google!”) programme. One of my favourite reports from this tool is a list of the Top Pages on a Domain, i.e the ones which probably carry the most clout with the search engines.

Why do you need to know this? Because these are the pages which can pass strength to other pages on your site through the links on them. And it’s often the case that your strongest pages aren’t that important to you now, but may have become important because of some historical circumstances. On many websites some of the strongest pages are blog entries. It might be a good idea to go back to those pages and link to pages which are now more important.

And it’s not just search engine strength to which this technique is applicable. Look at your website traffic. Are there some pages which are getting quite a few visitors which aren’t really that important to you? Why not add links on those pages to lead visitors on to any (relevant) pages you’d prefer them to see?