The most common way to insert nodes to a general tree is to first discover the desired parent of the node you desire to insert, and then insert the node to the parent's child list. The most common implementations add the nodes one at a time, however since each node can be considered a tree on its own, other implementations build up a whole sub-tree before adding it to a larger tree. As the nodes are inserted & deleted dynamically from a tree, tree is frequently implemented by link lists. Though, it is simpler to write algorithms for data representation where the numbers of nodes are fixed. Figure illustrated the structure of the node of a general k-ary tree.

Figure: Node structure of a general k-ary tree

 Figure: A linked list representation of tree (3-ary tree)

Figure illustrates a tree with one data element & three pointers. The number of pointers needed to implement a general tree depends of the maximum degree of nodes into the tree.