SEO deep linking strategy

SEO Deep linking strategy

One aspect of SEO that is often mentioned, but rarely discussed, is the strategy of deep linking.  Many times, discussions on the topic actually discuss the facet commonly known as backlinking, but it is important to understand that these two items are not the same, even though deep-linking requires that you acquire backlinks to make it work.  Simply put, a backlink is a link on another site that links to your site, and deep-linking is the concept of spreading backlinks to your site out among the pages of the site rather having all backlinks point to your main (index.html) page.

Let us begin with a website that contains 4 pages, the main page (index.html), an “about us” page (about-us.html), and services page (services.html), and an information page (info.html).  All 4 pages are equal at first, with a PageRank of 0, or the proverbial gray bar.  But you have several outbound links to other prominent sites that are relevant to yours, and the owners of those sites have agreed to provide you with reciprocal backlinks.  Instead of having all of the backlinks point to your main page, consider spreading the power of backlinking out a little, and point them to different internal pages on your site.

Let’s say that first backlink you’ll get is from a page that mentions the expertise of your company, but it doesn’t give any real details.  If you ask them to link to your about-us.html web page, then people interested in knowing more about your company will click the link that reads “Click here to learn more about us.” Using a link that is anchored with the actual page title is good linking strategy, and the same phrase needs to be used throughout your about-us.html web page as well.  For the next site, they may mention the your “…services are the best to be found”, which will, of course, link back to your services.html page.  The same strategy is repeated, using a keyword oriented link anchor to point to a keyword enhanced page that matches in content.  Now you’ve got 4 prominently ranked websites that point to each of your pages, giving each one equal billing in terms of search engines ranking.  Repeat as desired on as many sites as you are able to do so, while avoiding the “easy” method of paid directories and link farms, which are seldom a beneficial solution, and more often than not simply point out to all who notice you at all that you chose the easy way out instead of making your site a worthwhile experience.

The drawback of using deep-linking strategy is that your main page is only getting a quarter of the attention.  This could result in the main page not ranking as highly as it could, but all of your pages will achieve ranks, instead of only the main.  On a well designed site, anyone (or any spider) who arrives at an internal page can simply follow an internal link back to the main page.  In this way, you form an unbroken chain of links that support (through keyworded anchors) specific content based on the link clicked, and still refer the users back to the main page, thereby maintaining consistency and relevancy all the way around.  The process takes a while to fully implement, but it’s is often said that anything worth doing si worth taking the time to do it right, and deep-linking can provide far better results in the long run than simply having numerous backlinks pointing to your main page and getting no attention on those that exist internally.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com