What Is Deep Linking?

On the internet, there is a special type of link that you definitely want to have. It is known as “deep linking,” and it is the process of linking to a specific page on a website, instead of just the homepage.
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Why is this important? Deep linking greatly increases your visitors chances of finding exactly what they are looking for on your site. For example, if you were searching for chicken pot pie recipes and saw a link for it, when you clicked on it, you would expect to be on a page that had a recipe for chicken pot pie. If you were led to main page of a website and had to start your search all over again, you’d probably be disappointed.

Not only does the process of deep linking help your visitor but it also helps you with your tracking. You’ll be able to see exactly which pages of your website are getting the most visitors form incoming links. This can help them decide what the most popular content on their site is and what their visitors are looking for.

Deep linking also helps you achieve better search engine rankings. If there was a site about tropical birds that had links coming in to various pages on different types of birds, when someone searched for “parrot” then the parrot page would come up. The person would be able to visit the page that allowed them to learn exactly what they wanted.

If you participate in any advertising (especially pay per click), use deep linking to point the ad to the exact content what your ad is about. This should dramatically help increase your conversion rates. For example, if you have a site about gardening and place an ad for shovels, using deep linking in the ad to point directly to the shovel page rather than pointing to the home page; when your visitor finds exactly what they are looking for, the more likely it is that they will buy that shovel!

If the ad pointed to the home page, there may be some visitors who would navigate towards the shovels they were originally looking for but some would leave the site altogether. If the ad points directly to the shovel page more people would buy the shovels and that would increase the conversion rates.

Start creating deep links in a blog and link to specific content on the site. Include deep links in articles submitted to reprint directories. Experiment with this idea and see if traffic increases.