Are parts of your website invisible to search engines? Is your homepage getting ranked highly but internal pages are completely ignored by search robots? Are your older posts sitting there lonely on the back shelf of your website, collecting mould and attracting dust?

It has been said that Google works “on a budget”. If it spends too much time scouring your content-rich, image-heavy, flash-funky home page, Google won’t have the energy left to scan the rest of your site.

Define Deep-Link?

Deep-linking is the practice of peppering your website content with links back to other (often older) pages within your website. This way, both search engines scanning the site and people browsing your web space will maximise your website’s potential, not isolating their visit to the main pages but following links that lead all over the site. Having other websites link the pages that are harder to find or less promoted on your site are also deep-linking. Any links that lead to deeper-hidden, less viewed pages are deep-links.

Case Study Example

Fiesta Flowers is a florist business I’ve been helping out with search engine optimization. They had a successful website, generating lots of business for wedding bouquets. But the pages about funeral arrangements may as well have been non-existent, and simply weren’t showing up in searches.

The way that search engine robots work is that they index your site by what they deem to be the most relevant term after assessing your keywords and content. This could work in your favour when played in to wisely, or you could unassumingly be damaging your search results. For example, Fiesta Flowers had the word “weddings” on their home page eight times, and “flowers” ten times, including in the tags. Even the meta tags contained the word weddings as the pictures on the main page were of their best bridal bouquets.

During a visit to crawl the site, Google quickly took the most logical approach based on the evidence and decided that this was a website about flowers for weddings and assigned it to that category. Sure, the floral funeral pages were scanned as well but to Google, this appeared to have little relevance to the rest of the site.

Why Do I Need to Deep-Link?

You need to deep-link for your readers so that they are getting the most out of your website. Search engine algorithms reward deep linking, because it shows that your website is more relevant to readers than rain is to Victoria.

You need to focus on deep linking if:

• Your homepage has a good ranking but internal pages let you down
• Many pages aren’t getting indexed at all
• Your internal pages are optimized for competitive keywords

How Can I Deep-Link My Site?

A suggested guideline for delicious amounts of deep-linking is 2-3 links per page that lead readers further back in your site. A longer article could have more, but the average post, like this one or a little shorter, should stop at 3.

If I wanted to deep-link this article, I could have linked the word "links"; in the previous paragraph to this article here, that was published six months ago and enjoyed success upon publication. Since then however, Netregistry has gained a lot of new readers who may not have taken the time to go back through our archives – and, they may have been wondering what a quality link is. As I link to other articles on links within more pages across this website, Google perceives the site as an authority on links and will rank us higher for that term. It might not be as much a keyword of mine as “SEO”, but the more visitors the better: I’m sure that’s your website’s motto, too. Deep-link the dead pages, and you should see your website’s overall visitor statistics start to rise.

Don't Double-Up

If the Google robots discover duplicated content over different URL’s, it will waste the robots’ time trying to understand this and your site’s credibility will be lowered.

The pages of your website should be populated with frequently updated, keyword-rich unique content.

Extra for Experts:

• PDFs are a huge time-drain for search engine robots. Have them as downloadable files, not taking up page space on your website.
• Try to get more back-links from sites that are regularly crawled. You can do this by sending a link request

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