seo
posted in search engine optimization  on 12 December 2007
by Andrew Lang 
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The importance of deep links

This article assumes you have SOME knowledge regarding link popularity and link building for your website. It's an introduction to deep links.

What is a "deep link"?

Quite simply, a deep link is a link pointing to a page on your website that isn't your home page. For example, if you have an e-commerce website selling tools, and you have a specific page listing hammers, a link from another website pointing to this specific page about hammers (e.g. yoursite.com/hammers.html) is a deep link.

What are the benefits of deep links?

  • Deep links give "link juice" DIRECTLY to the page they are linking to, so this is a good way to get a number of your web pages to rank well in the search engines
  • Deep links give your site a far more natural "link profile" to search engines. If you ONLY had links to your home page, it's not so natural because people like to link to interesting content - so they're more likely to link to a specific page than the home page of the website (where the users would then have to navigate to find the interesting content if it's not on the home page already). A hundred links to your home page and zero links to any other pages on your website isn't natural.

How do I get other websites to deep link to the pages on my website?

  • The best way is to compel people to do this via interesting and unique content. This gets you one-way links that are natural.
  • In a search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN), enter in the search field "add url" + other keywords related to your industry. For example : "add url remote control cars". The results for such a search should consist mainly of web pages where you can add your link to a web directory or website. Here you can add a deep link to your own site yourself. These websites normally ask for a link back in return (a reciprocal link). These are less value than one-way links but it's a great way to add a deep link to your site. This is a big advantage over link network sites like link2me.com and linkmarket.net where you can only have ONE page sites can link to per account you set-up with them.

On the last point, link networks are currently very popular with website owners looking to gain better search engine rankings via link popularity. The problem is, by-and-large, they are building up hundreds of links to one single page. This makes their link profile look unnatural to search engines. These days it's better to get 5 links to 5 separate pages (all with unique anchor text) than 5 links to your home page (even if they have individual anchor text).

If you consider that a lot of your competitors are now link building in this way (i.e. building hundreds of links pointing to their home page), it's an advantage to start "deep link building".

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