In todays incarnation of the Internet search engine optimization or SEO is more important than webpage design skills. The best designed webpage has limited usefulness if no one visits it. A website is a product and a product that people dont know about doesnt sell. With the many search engines that are available it is important to know which are the most useful and how they are useful. Lets look at Google.
Google uses a particular search algorithm that assigns a value to websites called PageRank that is one part of how it ranks pages. The PageRank value is determined by several things but the most important are the values derived from the ingoing and outgoing links in your page. Lets look at that first.
The links in your website allow Google to navigate the pages on your site and index more of the content. Keep in mind that it is your pages that are ranked and not your site. You could conceivably have one page ranked higher than all of your others put together. This is the biggest reason to make sure that all of your pages have links into and out of them and that you never have dangling links or pages that can be linked to but not out of. This is why the...