Deep Linking

Deep Linking – The most important aspect of Link Building & SEO

Knowingly or unknowingly, bloggers, unlike regular website owners, usually do a lot morelink building and SEO activities. Many of them are via commenting on other blogs, link exchanges with friends, creating public profiles/SocNet accounts, being active on forums etc. However, many of us blindly concentrate on the link building activities directed to our home page alone than focusing on deep linking.

What is deep linking?

A Deep link is basically a link (hyperlink) that is pointed to a web page or post of another website/blog, rather than to the homepage itself. For example, when you use the commentluv plugin, you are actually creating a deep link to your last post from the post.

Why deep links are important?

In a typical search and hit (organic traffic) scenario, your search visitors mostly hit your individual posts and pages than your homepage. In other words, deep linking is a way to improve search hits on your specific content than your generic index page.

Ways to deep link your blog posts

There are a number of ways through which you can create deep links to your blog posts. Whatever be the mechanism, it is important to deep link using the right target keywordsthan just providing a URL to link. Now, let us talk about the typical ways to deep link.

#1 CommentLuv

The commentluv plugin provides a very easy way of linking to your last blog post (or a selected post). If the commentluv link is dofollow then it adds real value in terms of flowing the link juice to targeted post. There are several blogs that allow the Ajax editing of your comment, just after you post a comment. Please use this feature to edit your commentluv link to modify it for the right keywords, because you may not want to use the whole blog post title as keyword phrase (Be sure to consult the author if such an act could be marked as spam as per their comment policy)

#2 Be part of link love posts

You may want to be in good rapport with those bloggers who regularly publish link love posts. Close networking with bloggers from your niche is one of the (softer) link baitingtechniques. If gently asked, many of them might link to your posts in exchange of a similar favor some other time. You may even ask them to modify the links for the right keywords if you are willing to do the same for them.

[You could in fact go for a deep link exchange even with those bloggers who do not have the habbit of publishing ‘Some day’ link love posts, if you happen to identify a potential source post and contact the author about the link building potential]

#3 Use your target post URL to comment

Using your target keywords and individual post URL (rather than blog homepage URL) to comment on blogs is another way to deep link. But as in the first case, you might want to consult the author or comply with the comment policy before attempting the same. Many bloggers, in a moment of irritation, could mark you as a spammer while moderating such comments (I am yet to publish a comment policy)

#4 Use profile URLs and descriptions

There are a number of websites and upcoming social media networks that allow dofollow URLs (some even with keywords) on the profile pages and descriptions. You could easily tap into such opportunities to do quality deep link building.

#5 InLinks campaign

The InLinks product from Text Link Ads provide a very good deep linking platform (paid service) to drive your link building campaign. There are similar products from LinkXL as well.

#6 Article submission

Organized article submission (or even article marketing) via high PR article sites can certainly speed up your deep link building campaign however, beware of those cheap services that offer article spinning.

#7 Keep changing your forum signatures

Those who are very active on forums, may keep changing the forum signatures in order to deep link to your desired blog posts. Forums, usually allow links (with keywords) on the forum posts as well once you satisfy the minimum post criteria or membership status as decided by the forum webmasters.

#8 Guest posting

Guest posting is definitely a way to improve your backlinks as long as the blog on which you are doing guest posting allow keyword rich dofollow deep backlinking. Some bloggers allow only linking to your homepage but you may negotiate on what you want.

#9 Directory submission

Submission to directories that support internal pages linking is another way to improve your deep links. Many paid link building campaigns focus on this aspect a lot.

#10 Onsite SEO – internal linking

Internal linking via the right keywords is very important – whether is in the form of plain linking or facilitated by plugins (Related posts, Popular posts etc). However, many times when you use plugins, you loose out on the keywords unless you had opted for killer post titles. One way to avoid this is to manually linking such posts and probably you can even use the default Blogroll feature to add your key post links with keywords

Other deep linking tips

• You may not want to overdo with respect to keywords so that the content and the context sound unnatural
• Picking the inner pages of highly connected websites is always an advantage if it is in the right context. Sometimes, a deep link from a PR0 .gov or .edu link will have more weightage than a link from a PR2 or PR3 .com domain
• Focus on the link strength (will talk about it another post) as well as the inbound links to the page from where you are linking. You can use a backlink checker before linking from a page
• While internal linking to your own posts, be wise – Do not use URL title such as ‘as I mentioned in last post’ etc but use target keywords without loosing the context and flow of reading
• Avoid deep linking from frames. What you may get in terms of link juice and strength may not be exactly what you percieved
• Regularly check the backlinks to your top search hit posts and use those source pages to further deep link to your other posts, if at all possible

Deep linking has its benefits regardless of whether Google changes PR algorithm or not. At the end, the quality and depth of a website’s content is decided on the basis of inbound deep links that is coming to the individual pages than just the homepage.