How to improve "Total Links (as shown in SEOMoz)"

[foodiebytes]

I manage http://www.foodieBytes.com and responsible for the site's SEO. I wanted to understand how SEOMoz calculates internal links. I have been trying to improve FoodieBytes internal site structure to increase the internal links number but so far it has not moved.

In the image below (Root Domain Matrix as shown on Open Site Explorer on SeoMoz), the first column is for FoodieBytes.com and the second column is for a competitor's site. External link numbers are very close for both sites but the internal links for competition is way high. The number of pages on FoodieBytes and the competitor in the attached image are comparable.

I am looking at the "internal link" numbers as a way to improve the "total links" profile for FoodieBytes in hope of SEO improvement for the site.

Thanks for input.

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[icecarats]

2 million internal links? That seems excessive... are you sure that the competitor doesn't have some kind of recursive link structure/site structure problems? I've noticed that the crawler isn't super smart about untangling those, other than throwing up a lot of 'overly dynamic link' and 'duplicate content' warnings.

[foodiebytes]

The site structure seems fine. In fact, IMO, it is a well designed site. The internal links does look excessive but maybe I have their page numbers incorrect.

I compared menupages.com and urbanspoon.com just for kicks to see how they compare to external links vs total links as reported by SEOMoz Open Site Explorer.

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Urbanspoon.com - 862,377 | 3,227,851

Menupages.com - 361,063 | 1,098,650

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I guess my main intention is to understand how "internal links" are calculated and how important it is for SEO.

[Miranda.Rensch]

The main value of internal links is to make sure that the search engine crawler can reach all of your pages and so that the link juice is spread to the pages on your site that may be linked to internally only (giving them a slightly higher chance of ranking higher).

So, its not really important to have a lot of internal links, but rather make sure that your site has an architecture which links into all of your important content (anything you might want to rank).

Here's some more information: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link

I hope this helps!

Miranda

[foodiebytes]

Thank you. It was indeed helpful.