Good Navigation - The most important issue here is to make sure that the site navigation is correctly spidered by the search engines.  We can ensure this by either use of anchor text and text based navigation, or an image-based navigation type with significant 'alt attributes' attached to every image link in the navigation.  Avoid Javascript and Flash navigations because they are still not well crawlable and spidered by the search engines.  If you still want to keep your 'flashy' navigation then I'll suggest you include an alternative navigation that would be spidered by major search engines. For example, you could have a text based navigation at the bottom of your page, this will help you inner pages be more spiderable.  

XML Sitemap - I cannot stress enough on having a good XML sitemap on your website.  Sitemaps provide an overview of the site at a single glance but at the same time they help search engines crawl the website.  Submitting a XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool for example can be very useful since it gives the search engines a concise format that provides spiders with a super-fast blueprint for indexing a website. Furthermore, sitemaps also improve web usability as they are an alternative form of a site specific search, which brings users to the information they need quicker.  

Breadcrumbs - I believe breadcrumbs are excellent internal linking tools. Being 'links' by nature, they aid with internal linking and consequently increase the search engine visibility. In addition to anchor text differentiation, breadcrumbs are very useful since they increase the general usability of the website by allowing users to know exactly where they are on the website.  

Links in Content - I had the chance to analyse different kind of websites in different industries but it was quite common to see a lack of links in their copy.  It's essential to have in-content links, since not only they are more likely to have higher click through rates (increased confidence path), but they are also capable to add more significance to a link because of the neighbouring text.  Therefore, the rule of thumb here is to have links with anchor text with targeted keywords in the copy of the website.  

Links to Important Pages - It's essential to always ensure that all important pages are well linked to other pages on the website.  I sometimes found it amazing how some of the most important pages of a website are not properly linked to other pages.  It is better to link them directly to the homepage so that they can benefit from the power of link juice passing from the homepage.  But time and again I see websites with important pages buried too deep and ending up with no page-rank at all.  And it's not uncommon to find those pages not indexed by the search engines.  

Cross-check Robot.txt - This may look stupid, but I came across cases where I found important pages of a website not being crawled and spidered because they were found in a section where the robot.txt was preventing spiders to crawl.  This mainly happen by mistake or when new pages are added to the website.  Sometimes webmasters tend to forget to go back to their robot.txt and check whether all crawlable/non-crawlable sections are up-to-date.  In brief, your important pages need to be findable, if not there's no way they'll get crawled and indexed.  

Linking Policy - It is very important to be extremely consistent in your linking behaviour. What I mean is that while linking pages we need to be meticulous about how we are building the links.  I once had to re-build the links of a whole website since links to the homepage were very inconsistent.  Some links were pointing to the .com page whereas others were pointing to the .com/index.php page.  The website also had some major canonicalisation issues where several links were pointing to identical pages but with different URLs.  Cases like this actually decrease all the power of internal linking since the link juice is diluted around the site instead of being intelligently focused on the essential pages.  In brief a link policy should be setup so that everyone building links knows exactly how and where to link them.  

Just to remind, good internal linking ensures that all pages on your website get properly spidered and indexed on search engines.  It increases the relevancy of a page to the targeted keyword phrase.  Allows proper link juice passing to internal pages hence increasing their page-rank. That's it, hope that this helps tuning and enhancing your internal link structure.  

Shortly after reading this, I was searching for a carpet cleaning service. I had used one earlier this year, but couldn't remember his number, so I went to his web site. Now bear in mind this is a one-man show, so what you would typically expect is at the most two pages - landing page and contact page. What you get is something else: 9 fully-optimised pages, a blog, and even a Twitter stream!

The thing that impressed me most, however, was the blog, 'My carpet cleaning blog'. Since November 2008, Chris (the carpet cleaner) has been diligently writing up many of his daily jobs as blog posts. Each one is titled with a variation on the phrases 'Carpet cleaning' or 'carpet cleaner', plus the location of the job, either as a postcode (W4, W14) or as the name of the location (Fulham, Wandsworth), and includes some detail on the job in question. In this way he is targeting relevant searches for carpet cleaning all over Greater London. Oh, and he follows these posts up with Tweets as well.

But that's not all. When he came to clean my carpets, Chris also explained how he has managed to get himself placed in Google Local Business ads for not one, but four different postcodes! By asking customers to write reviews, he is managing to come top of the list as well.

Ok, so not everything is rosy with his site from an SEO point of view. URLs need optimising, his blog is one of those 'wysiwyg' ones, and he has literally no incoming links at all. Still, with little technical background and knowledge, Chris has realised the importance of Google as a targeted traffic generator, learnt some of the basic rules of SEO, and applied them assiduously, and with great effect to one set of keyword combinations. Since last November, the site has been appearing on the front page of Google for many local London search related to carpet cleaning, and the number of contacts from his web site has literally doubled!

What's the lesson for me in all this? It's just as Mr Godin says - or as I interpret it anyway: sometimes, as we work on SEO for large organisations in highly competitive markets, we spread ourselves too wide, and look to achieve too much, making it far more difficult to deliver tangible results. Instead we need to identify where we can make a difference, and we need to focus on it. If an inexperienced one man band can do it, we have no excuses.