There has been considerable debate within the link building community about a technique called "link sculpting". This is one of the advanced link building techniques that you can apply directly to your website. Essentially, given that a search engine knows that your site has value (Page Rank) then you can have some influence about the context in which your site has value. There are several ways to affect this.

Benefits

Search listings are stronger and more focused
Organic visitors are more targeted
Users are better able to navigate your site to find relevant content

Emphasising link context

A really well designed website has considerable thought put into how pages internally link to each other:

Breadcrumbs

Many sites use "breadcrumbs" to help users and search engines alike to understand how different sections of the site relate to each other. (See diagram below). Navigation Breadcrumbs

Navigational structure

The synergy between the anchor text in your menu structure and the content on your landing page is important for both users and search engines. Imagine seeing a link saying "about us" on a page and clicking on the link only to find a web form but no address? The link should have said "contact us" but these inaccuracies are all too commonplace on websites. When it comes to SEO, these inaccuracies are dramatically heightened and search engines start to become confused about the context in which you have linked navigational bars to particular web pages. Having a page in the top level of your navigation tends to give more weight to that page, but if you were to link all your pages into the top level, then the benefit of this weighting is immediately diminished. Pages of content that relate to each other need to link to each other more regularly than pages that are on different topics.

Linking important keywords on the fly

This is more advanced and is particularly effective on CMS based systems where many people are creating content with a limited understanding of SEO. If you are an expert in a certain subject, then presumably you have a target page dedicated towards this content. It is entirely possible to create routines which pick up any mention of certain keywords and to link to the relevant landing pages whilst the page the user is actually reading is loading. If the user then doesn't understand a topic - but you do - then they can inform themselves from just a click away. A good implementation of this can be extremely helpful but a poor implementation can have a negative effect on search engines. We always urge our clients not to implement this technique without first consulting with us.

Removing redirects on internal links

You would be surprised at how many pages on your site have inappropriate redirects which have little or no obvious effect on the user, but a dramatic and largely negative impact on search engines. Some of the world's strongest web developers building .NET applications will be generating bad internal redirects without even being aware that there are several issues in .NET builds which affect SEO. It is the same for almost any development platform or CMS system.

In what other ways can you try to sculpt your site?

Using nofollow to try to sculpt Page Rank

Using nofollw was am advanced SEO link sculpting activity that grew in popularity in 2008 and the start of 2009 but it was never something that we advocated. The idea was to add a "nofollow" command to internal links that you did not want Google to take into account when interpreting your website. Nofollow is a syntax that Google and other search engines collectively came up with as a way for a website owner to say to a search engine that they do not have any opinion on the relevancy of the page they are linking too. One problem is that the protocol asks the search engine to make that decision for itself - so it really doesn't have the effect that was intended by search marketers. In addition, other pages on the internet - or indeed on your own site - may link to the otherwise "nofollowed" page, confusing a search engine even further.

Google webmaster sitemap

The alternative to link sculpting is trying to tell Google directly what page is important. Google's WebmatsterTools would like you to submit a sitemap with a specific set of criteria, which allows you to give relative weighting to each page on your site. In doing this, you can help to reduce the effect of pages on your site which do not have contextual relevance (for example, your website's privacy statement) whilst elevating the value of your main product pages. This is helpful, but a well designed website architecture should produce better results.