Deep Links SEO – Importance of Deep Linking
I have been meaning to write a post about deep links and the importance of deep linking for a while now, but it is only after working on e-commerce websites optimization that I realized how much people and self proclaimed SEO experts fail to create deep links. Since these are e-commerce websites people think it is hard to optimize them. Well, that is somewhat true, but our main points here are not e-commerce websites, but deep links and the importance of deep linking.
I can understand why people would skip deep linking for e-commerce, it is wrong to skip it, but I can understand. Deep linking is the best part about linking, but before we get to that, do yourself a favor, go to Yahoo site explorer and type in your homepage URL, check the number of external backlinks pointing to your domain. Now open the drop-box and check the number of all external links pointing to your entire site. What is the difference in numbers? If your homepage has 300 backlinks and your entire website has 400 backlinks that is bad, and the sad truth is that most websites have that ratio.
110 found backlinks to one of my pages
I can tell you that my homepage has about 150 backlinks and my entire site has 2,000+ backlinks, I did that from the start and when I look at my analytics and webmaster tools data what can I see? I see people coming to my internal pages and not bouncing, they find the relevant content they were looking for and they stick around. Why is that so? It is because of the simple fact that we cannot optimize our homepage for every single keyword we target, simple as that.
Yes, our homepage can be a great landing page, it all depends on the website, but we must link to our internal pages and create deep links, let’s see why, besides the already mentioned, and check out the reason why we need to use deep linking to our advantage.
Importance of Deep Linking
Fact Number 1. Deep linking helps us persuade the search engines that we have quality content throughout our site and not just the main page. We all know that link is somewhat equal to a vote, but this is not democracy, some votes weigh more than others. So if links are votes, when we use deep linking we are telling Google and other search engines that we have important content throughout the website and not just our homepage. Ring any bells? That means that we can increase the authority of the entire site, and not just a single page, which is our goal when we implement search engine optimization.
Fact Number 2. I already partially answered this in the beginning, deep linking increases the relevancy for a chosen keyword. We can’t optimize the homepage for every keyword, but our posts and certain pages have the desired keyword in the ULR, title of the page, title of the post and even in the body of the content, so that page will be easier to rank in the SERP for the chosen keyword than your homepage. By linking directly to that page with the chosen keyword as your anchor text you are increasing your overall websites relevancy.
Fact Number 3. No matter how small your website is, unless you have only 100 pages you will surely have to work hard to get all of your pages indexed. We need to have a good navigational structure on our website, and that helps search engines index our pages, but deep linking, both external and internal will help us get those invisible pages in the index and will overall improve our website’s visibility.
Deep Links Summary
These are just three reasons why you should use deep links in your SEO strategy, but they are more than enough. Personally when I type a query in Google I will most likely go to a deep page that pop ups in the SERP than to a homepage. I know that unless I am looking for a certain product or service I will not benefit from the homepage and I will have to look around the website, which means I will most likely bounce. If I am looking for information about a certain topic, I know that a deep linked page will have more chances of providing me with the content I am looking for. That is one of the reasons why I use deep linking, and I love when my deep linked pages show in the SERP before my homepage.
Also, if you have a linkbait on your website, it will always ataract links to the page where the linkbait is placed, usually deper pages, and not the homepage. So this is just a measure to show you how important and how much quality does your website content have.
So to summarize, deep linking will improve your website authority, your website relevancy and your website visibility in the SERP. Plus as the biggest bonus, your visitors are more likely to be satisfied with the content of your website when they land on a relevant page. Landing on your homepage is not the ideal solution for most of us, make sure that you use deep linking in your SEO efforts; perfect ratio by my measures is 20-80. 20% of all links should go to your homepage and 80% should be scattered throughout the website. So do yourself a favor, don’t skip deep linking, you can be sure that this is a great strategy that will bring results.
About The Author
Zarko Zivkovic is the founder and CEO of Practical SEO and also a passionate blogger. All of his free time he dedicates to his Practical SEO blog and giving free advice as well as participating in the blogging community.
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Zarko,
You’re quickly becoming my SEO Go-to-guy. The tool tells me I have 487 links to my home page… and 490 to my whole site! Yow, that’s not a good ratio at all. I’ll work to adjust that! Excellent, informative post.
Danielle
Glad to hear that Danielle
Well that about me becoming your SEO go-to guy, not the fact about your inbound link ratio! This is nothing to be worried about yet, you have a new website and this is normal, once you have built up some of your links to your homepage you can start working on various keywords for deep linking your posts or categories, so don’t rush it, make it natural
That’s a very well written post, Zarko, and the idea is very sound. Deep links occur all the time for websites with really great content. For e-commerce websites the owners will probably have to ‘build’ the links themselves, but the effort is almost always certainly worth it.
I agree that deep links are very important. You hear a lot of industry talk about the importance of linking, but few articles detail the importance of deep linking.
Tanks Michael and thanks JohnK, I am unfortunately aware that most “SEO’s” talk about how important link building is, but only a handful of professionals will tell you how to do it and why to do it. Compared to the top brass I am a small fish and nowhere near an expert and I know this from day one, so this is still pretty basic SEO we are talking about, we haven’t even scratched the surface of advanced SEO on this blog…
This is an excellent article. Really enjoyed reading it. Yes, deep linking certainly looks to be a great way to keep your visitors enraged and thus keep a check on the bounce rate, which is so very important to get the desired results. I have myself been trying to do the same by interlinking few old but important pages of the site with my new posts. Hopefully…it should help a lot. Thank you for sharing this valuable article.
Yes, it does help Aswani, if we are not sure what we can do to better our old posts we can at least link them now if we have what to link them to.
Internal deep linking as well as external deep linking are very important for our blogs, Google doesn’t like to see that all links are pointed to the root domain, so this helps us keep both search engines and visitors in the right place and tell them we have quality throughout the site
Very interesting stats Zarko check mines in yahoo site explorer but reading your post is a real eye opener i agree with you about deep linking ad rightly so we should not expect all links to lead back to our home page. Very informative post here. Thanks for the heads up.
Thanks for commenting Gary
Like I said, this is all very basic, but people still fail to miss this and keep building all their links to their homepage instead of adding a few deep links as well!
Hi ! thanks for giving information about deep linking. truly wonderful post!
I have always been wondering why SEO videos that you pay for never mention anything about deep links and focus mainly on creating links for the homepage of your website. Thanks for the info. This is something I got to try.
Deep linking this is the most powerful Link Building task.. with this we can get the good ranking for internal pages (Landing Pages)..
Excellent article!! I’m just getting started in SEO and there is so much to learn. I hadn’t even heard of deep linking until now so thank you for putting together this article
these is right to the point. Very good explanation
Wow! I thought I would be looking for hours to get my questions answered about deep linking… You covered everything I needed to know . -nice! You saved me some blood, sweat and tears on this one. Great post!
[...] than just creating a link from one website to link to yours. There is targeting to be considered, deep linking as well as various linking [...]
Hi its a great tool,well post is informative.Thanx to share
Very true information. It has displayed with numerous ideas and concept. Thanks for publishing this great and informative post.
@Zarko: Deep links are most of the time overlooked though are very important, for the exact reasons you mentioned above. Also, I’ve seen many websites ranking high with no deep links at all, but I like to build deep links for my website.
Maria
Hi, Great info!!
does someone can give addvice HOW to build deep linking?(i have more than 100 difrent pages that i would like to have links to)
Thanks.
You build links to those pages the same way you build links for any page John. The only thing you need to look carefully is for what keyword you want to optimize those pages! Start with some low level links for each page, bookmarks, forums, comments and even deep link directories if you can find them. Then identify which ones are truly important for your website and continue with quality link building, articles, guest posts, link exchanges, one way links etc… But you will have to cut down the number of pages, 100 is too much for one man to handle!
Hello Zarko. Thanks for the awesome article on deep linking. Its really very informative. Most effective way of Link Building is Deep linking.
[...] some-more about deep linking and other couple building strategies as good as all else per hunt engine optimization during [...]
As I see it, SEO deep linking is very important. This is one of the techniques I’ve used in my SEO endeavors. Aside from deep linking using blog commenting to non comluv sites, I am also implementing SEO contextual deep linking, and hey it enhanced Google search relativity. Maybe that’s the reason why Google love deep linking.
@Jesica: Great to agree with you “Most effective way of Link Building is Deep linking” very true.
Thanks Zarko, this has been a very realistic and practical tips. Kudos!
What percentage should be between internal and external links? Thank in advance.
@Alexey, there isn’t an actual number or ratio you should go for. the only thing you need to make sure is that you link to trusted domains and that you don’t have a great number of outbound links on your pages, the ratio between internal and external links doesn’t really matter.
Hey nice article! I gathered some nice information here. It really made me think about my own linkbuilding something has to change, anyway thanks!
@Zarko Thank you for answer! I’m trying to link only to trusted links.
@Alexey, sure thing
If you have any question feel free to post it in the comment section, maybe I should add “Ask an SEO” section as well…
As you know I’m a firm believer of everything you’ve written about this post, and I proudly support [DoFollow, CommentLuv KeywordLuv movement, with a little ‘more than my Luving thrown in for good measure.
Who wouldn’t like links to their internal pages? But it’s very hard to get them, because most backlinks we get are from blog comments, and you can’t use an internal page in the website field.
What i’m trying to say here is that i know of few methods to do this. I probably just have to browse your website more, i have a feeling the info i need is here.
[...] more about deep linking and other link building strategies as well as everything else concerning search engine optimization [...]
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Yea, good points. It’s so easy to forget about (or discount) the importance of deep link building. I’ve been looking specifically for certain blogs that allow deep linking (like .blogspot blogs) so that I can build them!
Zarko what I have found is that most people don’t know anywhere near about SEO as they should. If you have a business blog or website it should be a given that you at least have some general knowledge of SEO. Deep linking is something I have always paid attention to. You are right the strength of the entire domain is important and the majority of your links should come within the site.
Deep linking is the very best way to enhance the rankings of niche keywords; it tells google what the web page is about. It also helps the rankings if the on page SEO has been well preapred.
Really enjoyed reading it. Yes, deep linking certainly looks to be a great way to keep your visitors enraged and thus keep a check on the bounce rate, which is so very important to get the desired results. I have myself been trying to do the same by interlinking few old but important pages of the site with my new posts.
I think the 3 points you mentioned above are really good… and more often we tend to forget the importance of deep linking… Plus through personal exp i have learned that the bounce rate of properly optimized and linked deep pages is way to less
Hey,
Very well thought out post. This should convince all those who only try for homepage links.
Like especially the bit about relevancy.
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