Deep Linking: What Is It And How To Do It

If you have been our client, or are just a reader of our blog, you probably know we are a link building company. Link building is a part of SEO that helps sites increase their authority. You can do it yourself, or you can let us do it for you. The process might take a lot of your time and dedication. You have to comment on other people’s blogs including your link, ask them to put your link on their website, or share your links all over social media, all that while being careful you don’t spam. Tough, I know. Totally wroth it though! One important thing to remember is – make it look as natural as possible. This is where deep linking comes in.

We mention it a lot on our site – deep linking is something we do by default for all our clients. What is it then? Deep linking is actually best way to do link building. It means you’re not linking back only and exclusively to your home page, but to your inner pages as well. You are giving your visitors a link to exactly the content they are looking for. Before starting with deep linking, you might want to check your backlink profile, using a tool like SEOmoz Site Explorer. There you can check how many links there are to your home page and inner pages. If you have A LOT more links to home page than the rest of your website, you should fix that.

Benefits of deep linking

Having more links to your inner pages from high authority sites will increase your site’s authority. It will increase your site’s usability and decrease bounce rate. For example, you are running a food blog and are building links to it. If people want information about “vegetarian pizza recipe”, you should link to the article about that, not the home page, so people don’t have to look around and get frustrated for not getting what they asked for.
Deep linking will surely increase your site’s traffic. This is fairly logical assumption, since the process increases your search engine rankings. As you probably know, you can’t target ALL your preferred keywords on your home page, so it’s great to have inner pages that can rank for different keywords. Also, if a customer clicks on a link and gets exactly what they wanted, they will come back later.
Having well scattered links to your home page and inner pages will make your backlink profile look very natural. Search engine crawlers will analyze your site and notice if there are too many links to your homepage and a little or none to your other pages and will assume it’s unnatural and even span. You can even get penalized by Google for that, so better not risk it.

How to do deep linking

Us at Red Square SEO do deep linking by default, unless you demand we only link to the URL you prefer. If you give us your homepage URL in your ordering form, we will always include at least 1 or more additional links from your website in our link building campaign. For example, you want to rank for www.site.com, we will also add some links to your inner pages, like www.site.com/contact, www.site.com/blog, www.site.com/about and similar. Of course, you can mention your preferred inner pages, if you want.

If you want to do deep linking yourself, it will take more time. We will suggest a few ways to do it.

How to do deep linking?

Include your inner page links when posting blog comments or forum replies. It’s pretty “normal” to put a link to your home page when posting a blog comment, but we suggest you link to an inner page that is closely related to the content of the blog or forum topic you’re commenting on. Readers will love it and you will get some traffic and great backlink.
Link to important inner pages from your email signature or author bio, especially if you’re sending out a lot of emails daily or are doing guest posts on other blogs. Just like in blog comments, people naturally put links to home pages in their email signatures, but linking to a helpful inner page might be a better idea. For example, I’d put my Mobile SEO Check List infographic link, since it’s probably the most useful article I’ve written and many of people I email to could find it useful.
Writing guest post is a great idea to get more traffic and build some links. While writing a guest post, sneak in some links to your inner pages and older blog posts you’ve written about the similar topic.
If you have a website about a product, it is a great idea to track mentions of it. You can use Google Alerts for that. Just type in your product name, or your target keyword, and get a notification when it’s mentioned. Then, you can visit that website and kindly ask the webmaster to include your link somewhere in the text. It might not work every time, depending on the friendliness of the webmaster, but it will bring you a lot of traffic and make your backlink profile look much better. Especially if it’s a high authority website!
Post your important inner page links on Social Media too. Share the links on your own profile, or comment on others’ posts with it. Include some of the links in “About” sections of your social media profiles, and don’t forget to be active in groups and discussions about your topic of interest. Social Media is a part of SEO and it’s very easy to build links there.

Deep linking is a big part of a good qualitiy SEO campaign. Having links to home page only is never a good idea, so make sure you do deep linking no matter what your website is about. Your backlink profile will look completely natural, the authority of your website will grow and you will move up on search engine results pages. Not to mention the fact that your users will LOVE that they are brought to exactly what they asked for instead of getting to homepage and wondering around to find what they were looking for in the first place.

Are you doing deep linking yourself? Do you have any extra tips that our readers could use? Comment below