If you are an experienced webmaster then you probably know that
creating back links to your website is one of the best things
that you can do to improve your Search Engine Ranking Placement
(SERP). Google openly discusses the importance that their
algorithms place on back links and even recommend that webmasters
who want to increase their traffic use back links. Both Yahoo!
and MSN are starting to talk openly about the importance of back
links in their search algorithms as well.
There are a number of strategies that you can use to create back
links to your website. Some of these strategies include emailing
webmasters and asking them to place a link to your website,
submitting your site to directories, distributing free reprint
articles, and paying for links. All of these have their pros and
cons, and some have a better success ratio than others.
How Many Back Links Does Your Website Have?
Take a look at your website and see just how many back links you
actually do have. Do not do this for only one search engine,
but for all search engines where you are trying to get good SERP
results. To check your backlinks, simply type into the particular
search engine's box link:http://www.yourdomainurl.com/. Of
course you will replace the yourdomainurl with the name of your
own domain.
The more back links that you have to your website, the better off
you are. Not only do back links help your SERP, but also the
visitors of pages where your back link is listed may just choose
to visit your site.
A common mistake that new webmasters make is that they create
back links, but they have all of these links pointing to their
home page. It is great that you have 50 back links pointing to
your home page, but take a look at other pages on your site. How
many links are pointing to these pages? The answer is probably
zero unless you have utilized deep linking in your link building
campaigns.
What Are Deep Links?
Deep links are links that go to specific pages within your
website. For example, let's say that you have a home improvement
website that has a large number of pages and articles on it
telling people how to do projects. If all of your back links are
pointing only to your home page and you have none pointing to
specific article pages, then you are not getting the full benefit
of your linking activities.
Think about it this way, if I go to your website and find a piece
of information that I find particularly helpful or interesting
and I want to tell other people about it, how will I do it? When
I tell all my friends on my blog about this great page of yours,
am I going to link to your home page? No, I am going to copy and
paste the actual webpage address out of my browser, into my blog.
That is deep linking and what is considered to be natural linking
by the search engines.
What Are Natural Links?
Natural links are those links that are created by people other
than the website's marketing team. Suppose I posted a link
in my own blog that said that the "most easily understood
tutorial, I have read, for creating a php-xml parser" was:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-xml-parsing-rss-1-0, and
I put my quoted text into the link. That is a natural link,
because I created the link with no prompting from the management
at SitePoint.com.
Difficulties In Creating Deep Links
There are a few problems that you will run into when trying to
create deep links to your site. One problem is that if you ask a
Webmaster of another site to link to you, they will most likely
just link to your home page. When you submit to directories, the
vast majority of them will only allow you a link to your home
page, not a deep link. Even if they do allow you to submit a deep
link, they will not allow you to submit 10 deep links.
Success Tips For Creating Deep Links
Deep linking is quite a bit easier when utilizing free reprint
articles as a part of your link building campaign. This is
because you can put whatever link you want to put in the "About
The Author" box. The About The Author box is required to stay
intact in all websites that are using your article. If you intend
on writing a large number of articles to promote your domain,
then you will want to optimize your results by putting a
different deep link into the About The Author box for each
of the articles that you write.
Another method of doing this is free and easy, but requires a bit
of time. Take keywords in each page of the text on your website
and make a hyperlink on that word or phrase to another page on
your site. This is very easily done if you know how to do basic
HTML. The ultimate goal here is to have every page of your
website linked to, at least once, by another page on your site.
You will want to spread these out among your domain's webpages,
instead of having just a couple of pages linking to the other 50
pages.
Another reason to spread your links across all of the pages of
your domain, is that users are likely to be turned off by a page
that is almost all hyperlinks; those pages often appear spammy or
cluttered. A good idea for any Webmaster is to create these
internal deep links when you create a new page. It is much easier
to spend a couple of minutes from the beginning, rather than
trying to go back and do all of them at a later date.
Incorporate Deep Linking Into Your Linking Strategies
Deep linking is as important a consideration as back linking! It
does not matter which page visitors use to enter our websites. If
they like what they read on our internal pages, they are more
likely to view other pages on our websites. If they view other
pages on our website, they are likely to find our homepage, and
we will get a chance to tell them why they should buy our
products or services.
Deep links to our website help to ensure that the search engines
will have good cause to show our internal webpages as well as our
homepage. For every page in our website that gets great SERP, our
chances of getting a sale are increased significantly.
We have 15 pages on our website, eight of which provide real
content to our prospective clients. All eight of these pages have
a significant number of back links pointing to them. 48% of our
visitors land on our home page. 37% of our visitors land on our
internal pages. As a result, 85% of our traffic lands on our
website as a result of our back links, either directly or through
our natural search placement in the search engines. The remaining
15% arrive on our website through bookmarks, personal referrals,
and paid listings.
