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There is an overextended discussion slowly pacing its way through the SEO community regarding “overoptimization”, and in some corners people refine that discussion to internal navigation, although we could easily argue about what constitutes “internal navigation” (okay, I could easily argue about what constitutes “internal navigation”).

This is one of those SEO myths that seeks to explain phenomena without enough data to show that the explanation is credible. For example, near as I can determine, I use every page on every site I create to link home with targeted anchor text (most of the time, the keywords are brand-valued). I’ve never seen anything like an “over optimization” penalty for any of these sites.

But I strive to get my visitors to the right place as quickly as possible. Visitors tend to be disoriented when they land on random pages. They have braced for impact but the impact is still jarring.

That is, when you’re dealing with long-tail search referrals people usually know they are clicking through to a deep page that may or may not be what they are looking for. Visitors often guess that the search engine is putting them close to the right page if it cannot find the right page.

That places the burden of guiding the visitor on you, the SEO, because you’re optimizing that visitor’s search experience from the time they pick a link to click on until they take whatever action is regarded as a conversion (informational, transformational, or transactional).

Disoriented visitors look for something specific when they first click through to a page: confirmation that they are on the right path. If the page is what they want, great. If it’s not what they want, it needs to lead to what they want, and the shorter the path the better.

Conventional wisdom teaches us that visitors look for the home page to reorient themselves. In effect, they are adding a page between themselves and their destination because they are going through a mental reset. They are getting their bearings.

One way to reduce this extra page stressing on visitor paths is to provide more information on each page than you would normally expect to find — but the additional information needs to be packaged and flagged in such a way that people will see it and know it for what it is.

That information usually consists of text links or advertisements (usually graphical ads). The text links are the secondary navigation that is relevant to the page’s local neighborhood (its “section” on the site) OR they are cross-promotional links. Depending on your site design you may be able to provide both sets of links on a page without confusing visitors.

The advertisements are calls to action (well, they should be). If you have a 500-page site that sells an eBook, every page should have that invaluable “CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD NOW!” graphic. Don’t fuss over whether this is part of the site’s navigation. Most visitors will look for your home page before they scan your navigation to find that embedded “Downloads” link.

Using on-page ads and secondary nav menus or cross-promotional links to attract the visitor’s attention to what they probably want to find cuts down their travel time to the destination. It helps improve their search experience.

Search optimization is not just about getting people to visit a page. It also includes what happens after they click through. When you’re trawling for long-tail traffic you need to make sure you’re not dragging out the discovery process by forcing people to bounce all over your site, looking for what they really want.