Most savvy website owners today understand, at least in general terms, the importance of gaining backlinks for their website — all other things being equal, a site with a large number of quality, relevant (to the theme of the site) backlinks should rank better in search engine results pages (SERP’s) than a site without them. These backlinks may also help to drive some traffic to the site, depending on where the link is found.

But many of these same people make a mistake: they only try to secure backlinks for their “main" or index page — the page that appears, for example, when you type in the general URL for that site (i.e., cnn.com, google.com, ezinearticles.com, etc.). A good question to ask is this: is there a benefit to backlinking to any of the OTHER pages on the site?

My position on this: it is generally very valuable to do this backlinking to interior website pages. Why? For several reasons. First of all, in the “real world" it is very rare to see any authoritative website that just has backlinks to its main page. If you have, let’s say, 200 backlinks for your site, and all 200 of those links point only to the main page, would that not seem very “unnatural" to the search engines? Would not normally at least a few of those links point to some of the other site pages, if they were acquired naturally? So one reason for doing interior page backlinking is to make sure that you do not get into trouble with your friendly neighborhood search engine.

But there is another big reason to do this type of interior backlinking. Consider the last time that you did any type of search using a search engine. When the results of your search were returned to you, what types of web pages came up in the listings? Lists of index pages only? Hardly. Most of the returned results pointed to interior site pages. Remember that — keep in mind that you want people to find your site’s interior pages also — and they need to rank well in the SERP’s — so you want to make sure that you regularly do some interior page linking as well.

Now, you will discover endless discussions taking place in SEO, Internet Marketing and Webmaster forums concerning what percentage of your links should be to interior pages versus index page, etc. Personally I prefer to use the 50-50 rule: 50 should point to a variety of interior pages.

That means, for example, that if I have a site of 10 pages, and I am going after 200 backlinks for that site, that I make sure that 100 of them will (eventually) point to the index page, and the other 100 point to the other (interior) pages — perhaps evenly distributed (in this case 9-10 per interior page). Normally, in my SEO efforts, I will secure the links to the index page first (just to keep this whole effort organized), then a bit later on secure the interior page links. So far, this strategy has worked well for my sites; I encourage you to try it out with your sites in your market. But however you go about it, make sure that you do regular interior page backlinking.