Traditional SEO focuses on promoting your website elsewhere to receive higher search engine result placements (SERPs), and on performing search term research to use the strongest possible keywords in your website. If you do this well, your homepage will show up prominently in search engines like Google or Yahoo, but the rest of your website pages will not appear so prominently. As part of website promotion, deep linking can help your other pages rise in search engine results for broader coverage.
Deep linking, sometimes called internal linking, improves search engine optimization for internal website pages by linking those pages to one another and by getting other websites to link to internal page contents. There are lots of clever ways to integrate deep linking into your website. Try these tactics to get started:
1. Use an internal page in your email signature for site promotion — especially if you’re calling attention to a specific product or service.
2. Write free guest blog posts on other blogs, then link to internal website pages in the text and biography.
3. Comment on other blogs — post a genuine, thoughtful comment and not something spammy — and include a deep link.
4. Post to forums that are in your industry, and link to an internal page in your post.
5. Incorporate internal linking into social media. This happens naturally if you’re linking to a blog post or product, so it shouldn’t be hard to work into your search engine optimization strategy.
How Internal Linking Affects SERPs
The advantage of deep linking is that is can appear seamless and not like shameless site promotion. When it comes to search engine submissions, search engines view the website that is the most popular as the most authoritative. Your own deep links, plus those hosted on other websites, act to push your page to the top, so you become king of the mountain. Create links in the navigation menu, in the website footer, and in the website content for strong search engine ranking.
If this sounds like a lot to handle, use your information architecture (IA) as a road map. As you view your IA, think about types of content that repeat. If you blog regularly about a topic or have a specific call to action on your website, perhaps this requires a landing page that links all of the content together, creating effective internal links.
