Realize many people are only interested in one small subject area on your site and may have no interest in the rest of it at all. Suppose an imaginary surfer begins their surfing session by going to AltaVista and typing in ‘baked ham recipes’. Most people don’t just surf casually but usually have a specific goal in mind when they start – they are often looking for some particular piece of information. Like a roast ham recipe. Of course, you’ve taken time to optimize your pages and meta tags so the search engines have your pages well catalogued. So when our imaginary surfer goes to Alta Vista and types in ‘baked ham recipes’ a link to an article about cooking ham on your food Web site pops up.

So if you have a food Web site with an article about ham, navigational button bars with links to your wine or fruit sections probably will not interest people who came to read about ham. I’m sure you have created very good sections on these subjects but let’s not fool our selves. No matter how good your wine section is, someone who comes to your site looking for a baked ham recipe is probably not going to click on your link to information about wine or vegetarian recipes no matter how good those sections are. But they will click on links to more ham-related information. Don’t drop the main button bars off your pages because of what I just said. Some of these visitors just might happen to wonder what type of wine to serve with baked ham.

In this case you would do well to put links on the page with the ham article to your other articles about similar subjects like bacon, organically raised ham, BBQ ribs or meats in general. At the end of an article it can’t hurt to say something like "click here for more articles on cooking ham and meats". In other words, try to figure out what they came for and make sure everything you have on that subject is put under their nose so they can view even more of your pages. Find out what visitors come looking for and offer them more of it. There’s not much point in having a link that says, "click here to read more articles about food". You should have links to articles about bacon, or meat curing or hickory smoked pork chops or how to BBQ ribs. This type of visitor does not care about what’s new on your site or about great jobs available in your understaffed Web shop. They don’t care about your columnists or wonderful new section on genetically modified foods. They are interested in ham and you would do well to cater to that interest.

This article is part of the Web Developer's Journal's Web Site Promotion Guide, a collection of articles on how to increase Web site traffic.