The Importance of Deep Link

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 traffíc 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.

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.

Four SEO Firefox Extensions: Optimize your Website!

Successful Search Engine optimization (SEO) often requires knowledge about how a particular website is performing within the context of search engine algorithms and rankings. In terms of earning money online, SEO is important because it increases the total quality and number of visitors from Search Engines by improving the position of a site's listing on specific search engine results page (SERP). More web traffic equals to more definite ad views, possible ad clicks as well as affiliate or product sales.

For bloggers or webmasters who run their own SEO campaigns, SEO toolbars can be very helpful in determining the value of link exchanges as well as other important factors such as keyword density and backlink popularity. Here's a short list of the four must-have SEO extensions for the Firefox browser.

Firefox you say? Don't you have anything for us Internet Explorer faithfuls? Aye, we do. Of the four extensions below, note that RankQuest and SearchStatus are available for both Firefox and IE fans. However, if you ever get the urge to try the very awesome and sexy Firefox browser, click on the button below to get more info and to install it for free.







SEOpen - Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar.

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I've tried SEOpen for a while and I especially like the right-click option to access the SE tools. It even includes an option to translate webpages into English via Google's translater. It's basically got all the basic elements an SEO enthusiast would need and the toolbar is really, really skinny and space-saving.






SearchStatus - Display the Google PageRank and Alexa popularity score anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other seo tools.

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For every site you visit using, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy. The SearchStatus Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox extension appears unobtrusively at the bottom of the browser on the status bar.

I have Search Status installed and particularly adore the nofollow and keyword highlighting options. It's pretty clean and does not require an extra toolbar on your browser. You can insert it into the status, menu or even the navbar. Available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.









SEO Quake - Quick view of site parameters in the Search Engine Results Pages "SERP"(Google, Yahoo, MSN, Yandex, Rambler are supported). Some IP and domain tools are included.

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SEObar indicate some SE-dependent parameters.















Gives you a quick view of the site parameters in the Search Engine Result Pages for Google, Yahoo and MSN. How does it work? It builds itself into your search results, allowing you to view a large number of SE parameters, which include information that ranges from PageRank and Dmoz listing to the Technorati index.









Rankquest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar - Provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

I think RankQuest is one of the toolbars that offers the greatest range of SEO tools. Not only including the usual link checkers, RankQuest also allows you to generate adwords, remove duplicate keywords and generate site maps. Very useful addition to the SearchStatus. Available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

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There you have ... all the mystial SEO tools at your disposal for web domination!

Thousands of Reciprocal Links & Getting Nowhere in Google - by Aaron Wall

SEO Question: I have traded hundreds (maybe thousands) of links. I am ranking great on MSN, but am nowhere on Google. What gives?

SEO Answer: Your site is associated with sites of similar link profiles. If most of your inbound links and/or outbound links are of low quality that may preclude your ability to rank. As your reinforce the identity of your site as being associated with low quality sites you are digging a bigger and bigger hole.

Your site may stay in the search index but just have it's rankings suppressed for your targeted keywords. The reasons search engines may want to leave sites in the index that are using ineffective search spamming methods are:

* maybe they will keep focusing on the outdated methods
* no reason to make it easier than necessary to reverse engineer exactly how to spam (even Matt Cutts pushes this line of thinking when describing how and when Google chooses to contact some websites that were removed for spamming)
* anything that blurs the line to what is effective outside of what Google really wants you to do is a plus for their relevancy


Sometimes you will see an older site that heavily relied upon reciprocal linking ranking well and think that you can just duplicate their link profiles, but typically it is not that easy. Largely because:

* when search was less sophisticated and there was less content on the web it was much easier to get quality links
* they probably have a few decent quality links you will not be able to get
* they likely built their link profiles over time, during a time when search was less sophisticated
* their domain might be trusted more (and thus given higher authority and more leniency for algorithmic infractions) because of its age


Recently I pulled the reciprocal links page off a friend's domain and got them about a half dozen average to decent quality links. Their site went from nowhere in Google's search results to the top 30 for their core term in a month. And I still haven't even built any linkage from sites I would consider core trusted seed sites or sites that are extreme topical authorities (in other words, in a few months they are probably going to be doing far better).

Algorithms will continue to advance, and what happened at one point in time, in one engine, with one site, is probably not enough to call it a representative sample. But if you think of search from the eyes of a search engineer, how hard could it be to detect mass reciprocal linking? What website content quality is typically associated with sites sharing that footprint?

Consider the math as well. Time is worth money. And my friend was paying $500 a month for a large scale reciprocal linking campaign. All they needed to do was stop doing that and get about a dozen reasonable links and they were suddenly a market player.

I often get asked about optimizing reciprocal linking methods, but unless they are associated with real social relationships that pull you into your topical clique I generally think they are not worth the effort and have a poor risk to reward ratio, at least if you are intent on building a long-term brand, and want to rank well in Google.