What is the Best Way to Site Structure My New Content?

[trader247]

I am about to start adding some serious content to my site in hopes of providing more info to my visitors and to build organic traffic. I am looking for the best structure and places to put my inbound links.

My website is tradethink.com and we specialize in trading systems for the commodities markets. I am going to be adding content about the particular commodities markets we follow; gold, soybeans, crude oil, etc.

From my research I see it is best to place as many inbound links as possible to the content pages. On the other hand I see that it is important for the site to be user friendly and not have to much link clutter on the home page.

I have a few options. Lets use "gold trading" instance.

1. Have individual links on the home page and most other internal pages that link directly to tradethink.com/gold-trading.html (lots of link clutter, but best SEO?).

Problem is that I am doing this for like thirty pages and would have an additional thirty links on all of my pages. A possible work around is to place these individual links at the bottom of my pages.

2.  Have home page and other internal pages link to tradethink.com/trading/ (just 1 link to add to each page), with the individual link still going to tradethink.com/gold-trading.html.

Here I am adding a folder "/trading/" to place all of the links in, but when you click on the link inside the trading folder it goes to tradethink.com/gold-trading.html and bypasses the /trading/ folder to get better SEO, shorter url?

3.  Have home page and other internal pages link to /trading/, with the individual link going to /trading /gold-trading.html

This seems the proper way, but am I giving up link juice by going to trading/gold-trading.html vs #2 above going direct to /gold-trading

Any advise/questions appreciated.

[EricaMcGillivray]

I think you should worry less about SEO best practices, which you seem to have a firm grip on, and more about how your customers would navigate through your website to find these pages. What are they looking for? What are your competitors doing? What feels natural? What do you want your navigation to look like? How could you naturally clusters your different type of pages? What would /trading look like?