The Importance of Deep Linking In Your Search Engine Marketing

[Lori]

I wanted to share an excellent article with you. It's talking about deep linking... links to pages within your website besides your homepage.

Very insightful...

Read here. (http://loriredfield.com/archives/31)

[MBenkert]

That's a great article. Really helpful.

Thanks!

Mindy

[Audrey]

Lori,

I loved the article. I actually email Chris Knight of ezinearticles.com He then pointed me to a "rebuttal" http://ezinearticles.com/blog/2006/06/deep-link-strategy-gone-wrong.html

I think it's a really great topic and I have loved reading two very different opinions of deep linking.

[Lori]

Thanks Audrey :)

Not sure I understand... I don't think he's saying to link to the same article on your site is he? How I understood it is to try linking to pages OTHER then your homepage. That way all of your pages are getting backlinks, not just the homepage.

Maybe I read my own thoughts into it. LOL. I'll take a re-read.

Lori

[Lori]

An example of deep linking, at least in the white hat school... would be when I linked to the article by Trey in the original post on this thread. I didn't link to my blog homepage, but rather linked to the page where the article actually appears. That's a deep link into my blog site.

The comments that Chris made seem to be about someone who linked to a page on their site that you couldn't easily navigate out of, thus strongly persuading the user to click on an ad. That's a whole different ball of wax.

[talk2christie]

How is deep linking better?

Christie

[Lori]

Ideally you are optimizing different pages on your site for different keyword terms. By getting inbound links to different pages within your site you are increasing the link popularity for those pages just as you do for the homepage.

When you think about it -- if you have 100 pages on your site, why not have traffic coming to any one of those pages? Especially if the pages themselves are optimized to the traffic coming to them for the visitor to make some kind of action.

So for example -- if you are selling widgets -- yes it's great of course to have lots of links coming to your homepage. But what if one page on your site is for black steel widgets? You can get links to that particular page that is optimized for black steel widgets. This lets the search engines know that this is an important page for not just widgets (like your homepage) but in particular for black steel widgets.

When someone searches on black steel widgets your very targeted page will be more likely to come up in the search results. They will come directly to the page they want instead of having to search your whole site. And because it is such a targeted term -- you will more likely make the sale.

If someone is looking for a 'work at home forum' and searching on that -- I want them to get directed right to the forum, not my homepage or some other page on my site. That's what they are looking for so I want them to find it right away.

So I need to build links that go right to http://www.freelancemom.com/forum so that the search engines start considering the forum to be popular. Then the terms the forum is optimized for will start getting better results.

Does that make sense?

[talk2christie]

That definitely does make a lot of sense. I had never really given a thought to this. Thanks...will work on this :)

Christie

[Web Content Writer]

Thanks so much for the article and your explain of things in plain English. Sometimes the jargon of such topics goes way over my head. I got a lot out of this, thanks again.