Deep linking is the process of linking to a specific page on a website, rather than just the homepage. For instance, a regular link would point to mysite.com, but a deep link would point to a specific page on that site, such as mysite.com/page1.
Some corporations try to discourage deep linking, as it allows users to visit a specific page, while bypassing advertising on the front page of the site. For most people deep linking is very helpful and actually sought after. The following are a few reasons why deep linking can help a business.
Deep linking greatly increases a user’s ability to find exactly what they are looking for on the web. If you were on a website researching chicken recipes and saw a link for chicken pot pie, when you clicked on it, you would expect to be on a page that had a recipe for chicken pot pie.
You would be disappointed if you ended up at a main page of another recipe website and had to search through all their recipes in order to find the recipe you thought you were linked to. When a website owner deep links to a specific page that contains the specific content their readers are looking for then the reader is much more satisfied.
Not only does deep linking help the website visitor but it also helps the website owner with keeping tabs on their tracking. They are able to see exactly which pages of their website are getting the most links. This can help them decide what the most popular content on their site is and what their visitors are looking for.
This can also help in the 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 pay per click advertising, use deep linking to point to exactly what your ad is talking about, which will help 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.
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.
I use deep linking often, as I would hate to lose a reader because they have to search for a post.
