Deep linking is one of the best SEO practices.
What is deep linking? Deep linking is linking to the internal pages of your site, instead of building links only to the homepage of the blog.
Typically, the majority of the webmasters build backlinks to the homepage of their blogs. They do guest posting for it.
The disadvantage is that due to only linking to the homepage, you are increasing the page authority of the homepage, but not the internal pages.
If you want to get the most of your link building, and want to rank your blog posts you need to build links to the internal pages of your blog. This is called “Deep linking”.
Benefits of deep linking
- When someone links to one of your old blog posts, it’s a signal to Google that your old content is still relevant to date. By this, you increase the chances of your blog post being ranked higher for some of the keywords.
- Spreads the authority uniformly. When you link excessively only to the homepage of your site, as I’ve said earlier, only the page authority of the homepage will be increased. If you want to rank all of your blog posts higher in SERPs, you have to increase the page authorities of your blog posts. This is made possible with the help of deep linking.
- By linking only to the homepage of your blog, you appear spammy. Many of the spam sites, tend to buy backlinks only for the homepage of their site and try to rank it. By following deep linking, the links appear natural and less likely be marked as spam by Google.
- By targeting only the homepage for your link building, you are trying to rank for only a few keywords. With the help of deep linking you are helping your inner blog posts to rank well for more keywords, it helps you achieve anchor text diversity.
- People who naturally link to your blog tend to link to your content i.e. specific post rather than just linking out to the homepage. These people link out to your content because they find your content to be relevant to the content you are writing. That’s the beauty. Natural deep linking strongly acts as content relevancy signal to Google.
Execute deep linking
Before executing this deep linking campaign, make sure that the internal linking structure of your blog is great. Relevant posts should be interlinked with each other. Make sure that the newer content links to older content and vice versa.
With internal linking, when you build links to a particular piece of content, you are ensuring that the ranking juice spreads all over the rest of the content uniformly. It thus increases the overall domain authority and ranking power of the site.
You should always try to attract natural deep links to your post, or appear natural while building links. Keep an eye on the speed in which you build links. Building links rapidly may raise a red flag.
Identifying content to build links
In this step, you need to identify 3-5 posts you need to build backlinks to. The content you select should already be driving decent traffic to your blog. Building backlinks to all possible posts on your blog is a red-flag.
Remember the 80-20 rule. 20% of your blog posts result in 80% of links to your site. Follow that. It’s the golden deep linking ratio.
When you build backlinks to posts that are already driving traffic, you appear natural.
The posts you select should be related to the topic you are trying to build authority.
From hereon, you could search for good posts that may link to your content. Outreach them to link to your content. You may follow skyscraper and email outreach technique.
The anchor texts you use for getting links should be relevant to the topic. You should maintain anchor text diversity in your blog. Using exact keyword anchor texts repeatedly is highly discouraged. Try using related keywords, brand name and name in the anchor texts.
Techniques to build deep links to posts
- While doing guest blogging, instead of building links to your homepage, try linking to your blog posts. Try linking to something relevant.
- Use your post URL as homepage URL while commenting on content. It drives some traffic, shares or even links to your post!
- Use your blog post as forum signatures.
- Use social bookmarking sites.
- Use blog communities to share your content and get links to the content.
- Share your posts on social media sites like Facebook, Google Plus and Linkedin.
- Make sure of content repurposing. Convert your posts to slides, videos, etc.
- Repackage your posts to other formats and share them on document sharing sites.
How to attract natural deep links?
Google advises you to let your blog attract links naturally. Here I’ll give you some unique strategies to attract natural links to your posts.
- Quality content. While writing blog post, make sure that it’ll be the best post in class. Research all the related posts, make sure that your post is more valuable than all of them. Cover every detail regarding the topic you are writing about. Other bloggers, when they link out, look for the content that covers the best information on the topic. {personally I’ve attracted 72% of natural deep links by this}
- While writing a post, present a unique fact. Highlight it. Add blockquotes to it. It increases the chances of other bloggers citing you on their blog.
- Create great visuals, images, and infographics that other bloggers can use in their blog.
Bottomline
Building links to the posts that are relevant to the topic is preferred over just building all the backlinks to the homepage. I advise you also to only link out to the specific relevant posts, rather than just linking out to the homepage of other sites.
Concentrate on earning natural deep links than building links.