Why ‘Deep Linking’ is Important

If your webpage only has inbound links to the home page, your rankings may suffer as search engines see these and can draw the wrong conclusions.

They may assume that your site is very shallow and may not contain much information, or if you have done a really good job with obtaining links, but have them all linking to your home page you could even be wrongly put under suspicion of spamming.

A website that has multiple inbound links coming to different pages is more likely to be viewed as a valuable site. The different pages may attract different types of attention, and you could have a broad array of people with various interests who link to specific pages of your site that are relevant to them.

An important thing to remember when acquiring deep links is that not all pages on your site are equal. There may be some pages you won’t want deep links to at all, because they are pages that only make sense when the viewer arrives at them through another page on your web – a ‘solutions to your problem’ page that should be preceded by the appropriate ‘state your problem’ page, for example.

Every internal page that has inbound deep links should have a guide somewhere on it that is easily visible and can be used to orient visitors. If they get to your linked page and decide that they want more info, or to check out your home page, those options should be readily available. A list of options like ‘More…’, ‘Home’ or (for long pages) ‘Back to top’ are invaluable tools to keep your customers engaged and bouncing around the site for as long as possible.

The amount and quality of natural inbound links helps determine your Page Rank, so consider having the very best inbound links zero in to your home page, then start concentrating on building rank on deeper pages using other inbound links relevant to each page. Try to link out from pages that already have a lesser ranking, not your homepage, because every time you link out you share a little piece of your rank.

Consider a page for outbound links that you may have that have lesser relevance to your site – certain types of reciprocal links, for example, and links from family and friends. You can call it the “sponsors of __________” page and use it as a promotional type page while adding no-follows to each link or even no-index to the entire page This will help you avoid any potential problems that could be caused by your unhelpful links.

Deep linking is a powerful tool, and should not be overlooked by any serious webmaster. Learning how to manage deep links and make them work for you can increase your traffic and the amount of time visitors stay on your site as well as helping you build your Page Rank and search engine popularity.

Happy Linking!