ronburk - 7:41 pm on Feb 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

how do you get around to proper thematic structuring of your site without a top navbar?

You don't have to remove your navbar. You don't have to abandon a nice, hierarchical structure. I'm just saying, tape a piece of paper over your hierarchical, on-the-edges navigation system for a day or two -- see your site the way fast-moving, nav-blind, informavores who come to your site see it. I'm not saying "take away links"; I'm saying "add relevant links".

but I am not sure how you handle the internal linking within the body of the page without appearing a bit artificial in terms of hyperlinking nearly every other word as Wikipedia does

If you try to think this way, I believe it will change your writing style, which can help you add these kinds of links without being artificial at all.

Suppose you just added a new page/topic called "widget restoration". OK, the obvious, lowest-level way to apply the advice here is just to scan all existing pages for the word "restoration" and jam in a link to the new page. But you can put more intelligence into the effort than just a global find/replace. What other pages are conceptually relevant to this topic? For example, maybe you have a page on "widget prices", and it doesn't contain the word "restoration" anywhere -- why should it? But wait... would it be interesting/useful to visitors to see what the price of a complete "widget restoration" might be? Maybe that means adding some text to the new restoration page about what that might cost, and then adding a by-the-way link to the "price" page pointing to the "cost of widget restoration". And then, maybe that gets you thinking that people are often interested in the cost of lots of things that aren't line-item inventory objects. Maybe you start thinking about "the cost of not maintaining your widget", and "the cost per day of operating a widget", and... And then you're off and running into potentially useful new content, just because you stopped to think about your existing content in a new way.

What was the crux of the mental device that spun off new content in this example? Pretty simple. Whenever you add a new page, skim through the rest of your content to look for ways, even creative ways, those other topics relate to your new page.. This is an exercise in seeing connections you didn't see before.

The hierarchical linking structure is a great and useful tool; don't give it up. But the intra-site linking structure is an independent tool, one that can both help your rankings, and help you think about your content in new ways that will lead you to creating more useful content. Wikipedia effectively only has the intra-site linking toolset, but you are free to use both of these toolsets to your advantage.

If you spend a couple of hours drawing a "mind map" of all the concepts your content covers, you will probably end up with a lot of arrows connecting topics -- more connections than can be expressed with simple hierarchy. But if those connections exist when you think about your content, why aren't they available to your visitors? There's no reason they can't be -- just start using that hyperlink the way it was originally intended (in addition to your hierarchical scheme).

There are also some who are distracted by links within the body of text (I am not one of those) and prefer to have links at the end of a given article, for example, for a centralized reference that does not pretend to be part of the narrative content.

Either way is better than not having the links at all. To me, inline text links are for situations where some readers really might need to read what's behind that link before they can understand what follows. To me, the choice is much like choosing between parenthetical text or a footnote when I'm writing a book. Style, consistency, and the details of the situation at hand should dictate the choice -- but I wouldn't normally limit myself to just one or the other.

But consider your demographic. Is the vast majority of your traffic from repeat or highly sticky visitors who spend a lot of time going through your content? In that case, making most links footnotes at the bottom of the page might just be best most of the time. Is your traffic mainly people who come in from Google, dip into one page and then immediately flit off? In that case, I would think real hard about the attention span of those folks and lean towards making every link I could inline, in the hopes that I will be able to grab their attention and get them to slow down enough to read more than one page, if I've got the content that's relevant to them.

Does it hurt to double link? For example if I have a link in the references, can I also link to the same page within the text?

Hard to prove what Google thinks, but I think not. If you have one sentence of text on your page, if there are more links than there is text, then I would worry. If you have a couple of screenfuls of useful text, and one of the in-text links happens to point to the same place as one of the navbar links, then I wouldn't worry one whit. Consider how many websites have two links to the home page on every single page.