Links are important. Very important. It’s the way your articles or pages are tied together. This is why you should not have broken links on your web site. From the SEO stand of point this means on page optimization or technical optimization. It is very important that all the links in your web site to point to a valid page because this is the way search engines crawl your site : if you have a couple of pages and no link is pointing to it then the search engines won’t index those pages and the content and the keywords from that content.
Another thing that over the ears has changed and evolved is how are we linking. And I’m not talking here about the main menu links. I’m talking about the links that have weight and importance in your web site : the links inside an article or the links from the end of an article or from the end of the intro text. Those are the links that count because it refers to pages that were maybe already referred so you can give more weight to those web pages by the search engine stand of point. So this is a key concept in SEO web design optimization : your links have to work – all of them.
No you should try to use descriptive links. And by that I mean links that contain keywords that describe the page you are linking to. Another good habit is to link to an anchor from that article in a point that is about what the link is “talking” about. Another thing that Google wants is that links that come to your site should be descriptive and the site that is linking to you to have the same main theme in their’s articles. This means that very soon recording your web site in the so called “link farms” or web directory’s will be useless, unless the link farm is specialized only on web sites that have the same kind of articles as your site.