Let's go back to the birth of the web.
Not the Internet, that's too far back, but just the thing we know as the 'world wide web' that was created by Tim Berners-Lee when he was working at CERN and he wanted a way to make digesting lots of information easy.
He came up with the idea that a page of information could contain images and text (which was pretty unimpressive) but then he added in the ability to link to other bits of information and also made the whole thing so easy to create and 'light' in its execution that you didn't need anything high-powered to read it.
Boom; the web is born.
Now the web as we know it isn't just there to satisfy the needs of some nerdy scientists, it's there for everyone and its primary concern is with content and information.
When we want to find something out we go to the web because we can tap in a search term and find something easily - brilliant, it's doing its job, but how can we use this to our advantage when considering search engine optimisation? Well the key is with the use of these links and more importantly, content.
Content in this instance is definitely king.
It's what makes the web tick and it's what people are looking for so it stands to reason therefore that it's what Google is looking for too.
It's no coincidence that Wikipedia is the number one search result for many search terms typed into Google, that site is absolutely chock full of information and content and lots of it links to other areas of the site.
So how does this help us? Well I'm not suggesting you install a 'wiki' on your own site and try to replicate an encyclopedia but you should perhaps consider your customers and what they may be after.
If you sell a service or product then there are many people who would like to know about that product before they buy or even engage with you.
The Internet is great at making information available in many forms and the more information you make public, the more chance you've got of Google picking it up and popping it in the index.
If it can find you and understand your content then it can serve that same information to a hungry public.
But you should also consider how you present that information and here's where HTML and the whole 'web' thing comes in.
Linking to other areas of your website is a doddle with a little bit of mark-up and your content management system will have buttons built in that will allow you to highlight a bit of text and add a link to it in a jiffy.
So, when you're adding content to your site then you should really consider linking to other parts of the site too in the way that Tim Berners-Lee originally expected it to be used.
It's safe to say that Google are expecting this too, and pandering to Google is no bad thing.
If it also helps your rankings then I'd say it's pretty much essential.