Deep links make all the difference.So just what are deep links anyway? We’ve talked here in the past about the importance from an SEO standpoint of building links to your website. Creating such links means your site becomes more popular and moves up in the search engine rankings.
Deep links, put simply are links to pages anywhere other than your home page. Getting them may be a bit tricky; however they’re vital to Internet marketing.
Why Deep Links Matter
Let’s look at a high school analogy, as we did the last time we talked about links. There are two kinds of relationships in high school – superficial ones and deep ones. While superficial relationships are good for a start, ultimately the ones that really influence your coolness factor (and social rank) are the deep relationships. Here’s what we mean:
If you are known by the head cheerleader or the captain of the football team in high school, that’s useful as far as social rank in high school is concerned.
However, dating the head cheerleader or the captain of the football team takes you to new levels – levels where you are considered at the top of your game and at the pinnacle of the social ladder.
Google and other search engines work the same way. They want to know more than that the popular websites have given you a nod of a link to your front page. They want to know you have deep relationships where pages inside your website are linked to elsewhere as well.
Having those deep links tells them that your content is worthwhile and you deserve to be front page news (or at least front page SERP results).
How to Get Those Deep Links
We’ve offered suggestions in the past for landing basic links to your website. Getting deep links however can sometimes be a bit more challenging. Here are three great ideas to make it happen:
Blog Commenting and Forum Commenting
We talked about this in the past as a way to build links for your website. However, where these kinds of things are especially useful is for deep links. You can comment on a forum or a blog about a specific issue and mention that you have a page on your website where you have more insight into it.
Now, not only have you built a deep link, but you have also made your forum or blog comment more useful, meaning other visitors are more likely to click on it and increase your traffic (not to mention that you are less likely to be pegged a spammer).
Social Bookmarking
If you don’t have a plug-in for your blog which allows your visitors to retweet or facebook comment a page on your website, not only are you missing out on useful links but you are also missing a golden opportunity to get deep links. This is the perfect and most organic way of doing SEO – getting your visitors to do the job for you.
RSS Feeds
Finally, your choice of RSS feeder matters. When you create RSS feeds, it’s useful to make sure that the feeds provide deep links to your website and not just to the front page. And you should always have a link back to the full article even if you provide full text articles in your feed (if for no other reason than to ensure deep links and possible comments from visitors).
No Matter What You Do
Bottom line regarding deep links: content was, is and always will be king. If your writing deserves to be linked back to, then it will be.
If you write garbage just for the purposes of SEO without bothering to craft quality writing, it doesn’t matter that you have all these great keywords. Deep links for junk pages will always be ten times harder to get because no one will care enough to link back to you.