In today's 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 don't know about doesn't sell. With the many search engines that are available it is important to know which are the most useful and how they are useful. Let's 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. Let's 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 navigation structure of your site is vitally important.
With that covered let's look at the main factors used for PageRank. First of all a page on your site has to be indexed by Google to even have a PageRank. At that point the page has an intrinsic PageRank value. That page has links to your other pages. When one page links to another page it increases that page's PageRank value without deceasing its own. It is almost like one page voting for another without penalizing itself. This is why you want to avoid any dangling links because although that page would have an increase in PegeRank it could not do the same for another page. With this in mind it is prudent to direct more links to your most important pages to increase its value. Then from that page the visitors to your site can link to the other pages.