What is Deep Linking?

If you have a website, deep linking should be an important part of your overall search engine optimization strategy. A deep link is simply a link to an internal page on your website, for example a product page, a blog post or any page apart from your home page.

Advantages of deep links include:

- They will help to boost your overall traffic by improving the ranking of your internal pages.

- The search engines will see these links as more natural as they are not all pointing to your index page.

Here are a few ways to quickly and easily get some deep links to your website.

1) Article Distribution - when you publish an article most directories allow you to have at least two links in your about the author box. As well as linking to your home page you can also deep link to an internal page on your website.

2) A Good Internal Linking Structure - make sure that you have a good menu or navigation system on your website. In addition to this you should refer to internal pages where relevant throughout your site e.g in blog posts.

3) Social Bookmarking - A lot of social bookmarking services will provide a backlink to your website. It is quick and easy to bookmark a page in multiple social bookmarking services by using a service such as OnlyWire. You should social bookmark every time you add a new post to your blog or create a new web page.

4) Doing a link exchange with other site owners - you can exchanges links with a webmaster of a similar website and request a deep link instead of a link to your index page.

5) Forum Posting - A lot of forums allow you to have a signature with one or more links to your website. Instead of pointing these links to your home page you can point some of these links to internal pages on your website. You can also refer people to relevant pages or blog posts on your site in a post, but be careful not to spam.

6) Paid Directory Submissions - some directories allow you to include deep links. However, these are usually restricted to paid submissions.

7) Blog Commenting - when you leave a comment on someone's blog you could leave a link to a related blog post or internal page on your website rather than your home page.

In summary deep linking can really help to boost your traffic from the search engines, and it is easy to fit this technique in while you are building links, without much additional effort.

About the Author:

Suzanne Morrison teaches people how to get a higher search engine ranking. Register for her free Search Engine Optimization Tutorial by email to learn more.