Deep linking should be a familiar subject for any web master. Some administrators swear by it, while others are actively trying to control their use and remove them from the Internet at large. Deep links, however, remain a very useful element of any successful SEO strategy.
For those unaware of the term, a deep link is simply a link that connects a page on one website to a page inside another. Rather than linking to the home page of the website in question, it brings the user directly to a specific page that is contained within the website, usually pointing to a specific piece of information.
What Makes Deep Links Valuable?
Getting links to your homepage is relevant for a successful SEO strategy, but deep links gather much more attention and offer better results for a number of reasons. Studies have shown that web users that are searching for specific results expect to arrive directly at the information they are looking for at the first click.
Search engines are well aware of this phenomenon, and their algorithms are designed to assess a greater degree of importance to deep links than to surface links that simply show the user the website’s home page and then force them to keep looking for the specific information they need until they find it.
Unlike internal links that are created by a single web administrator, deep links act as a direct, unbiased recommendation for the content on that specific page. Search engine crawlers tend to see this as representing a valuable piece of information related to the content of the page itself.
If you are a web administrator looking to increase the value of your content based on search results from all of the most popular search engines, deep links represent one of the best ways to do so.