Understanding What “Deep Link” Means And How To Get More For Your Site
Guest Post by Sam Mauzy.
Deep links lead clients to specific pages that they are looking for without having through the entire content. They are quick links to various areas of interest in your web page. To understand how to use these links for your benefit, you need to take some time to consider their advantages.
Increases relevancy of the website
By using chosen keywords as your anchor text, you enable users to directly access the relevant pages without bouncing around in your main page. It’s easier to rank the pages with the anchor text instead of the whole page. This makes your web page more relevant and highly ranked.
Ease of page navigation
Deep linking provides a simple way of navigating through pages and pages of content. By giving users means of going direct to what is relevant to them you make it a pleasant journey going through your webpage. It saves them time and the search engines will return better rankings for your pages. A good navigational structure for your webpage attracts traffic and makes your web pages trustworthy.
Search rankings
Use of deep links ‘tell’ the search engines that other people are interested on the pages of your website, not just the homepage. It goes to show that they regard the content of your website highly and go beyond looking at your attractive main page. Search engines will therefore rank your site and specific pages as important and put them high in their rankings of useful sites. Of course this translates to more traffic and business for you at the end of the day.
Increase in traffic inflow
Deep linking increases traffic flow to your pages and your website. This is because search engines will rank your page high as they take your site to be important depending on the number of deep links you have. Also, when clients get what they want with ease, they also rank your site as useful and pass the word around that your website contains specific content that they want. This automatically opens your site to more clients and more opportunities. Increased traffic for any website is good business.
Domain authority
External deep links coupled with internal ones make your webpage have authority over other pages. Remember the search engines highly regard sites that have a lot of back links and they rank them high up. When other highly ranked websites have your links, the search engines are convinced that your website has authority over the others and that your content is more important. For example, Wikipedia can be said to have authority over other similar sites and that’s why it’s ranked so highly by most search engines, all these thanks to deep linking.
You will boost your search engine ranking if you are able to get more for your site. Another thing that most website owners also do today embedding back links to other pages apart from the home page, and submitting those link pages to different directories. This is a great way of having your website to have more traffic through the search engines. You don’t even need to do the job yourself, as there are service providers that can do deep link submission for you, giving you an opportunity to take advantage of this important SEO marketing strategy. You only need to look for providers who can do it in a way that does not appear as spam to the search engines.
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Sam is a contributing blogger for a site that specializes in ecommerce conversion rate optimization.
Online Marketing Tricks of the Trade
A question you may be asking yourself if you run an online business is: who exactly are my customers? Sometimes it’s shocking to think that hordes of people want your service. You get that “they love me, they really love me” moment so typified in Hollywood movies. But think about it like this, you’ve done your research, planted the seeds of your business, and are now reaping your due harvest.
You may not need to use Anywho’s reverse phone number finder to learn every possible customer detail on record, but you do want to stay knowledgeable as to who your customer base is. The reason for this is that the market is changing constantly. Social media and search engine customization is always in flux, forever waiting for the next big game-changer or the next big algorithm. Here are a few tips that will help you as you move forward with your online marketing endeavors:
Separate your personal profiles and your business profiles on social media sites.
First of all, you don’t want to harass your friends and family with every detail of your business. Yes, of course, a few times a month it’s acceptable to toot your horn and use your personal profile to discuss an element of your business. But any more than that and you risk seriously annoying your most loyal brand ambassadors.
Increase your exposure.
Configure your site for social bookmarking so that your customers can pass on news of your service to sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Also, create a Wikipedia page for your business. Contribute as much to conversation marketing as you can by taking part in relevant forum discussions and participating in Google groups.
Optimize your site.
Nothing leverages you for Internet success more than SEO. Become friendly with search engines by creating a sitemap, XML if possible, and good internal linking structures. Not only does this make search bots more likely to find you, it makes your site more structured.
If you have the budget for it, create accounts on pay per clicks networks like Google and MSN.
If you’re running a cheaper campaign, look for quality impressions on lower tier networks.
We’re just scratching the surface here. There are hundreds of tools and strategies for beefing up your online marketing endeavors. A successful campaign will require a lot of research and scouring the marketplace for the best models in your industry. No matter what field you’re in, social media etiquette, social bookmarking and SEO are going to be major components to a healthy campaign. Figure out your budget and create a game plan.
Read MoreAdding Variety to Anchor Text for a Natural Backlink Profile
Guest Post by Andy Wallner
If you’ve ever encountered SEO, you know that the whole idea of search optimization is often a battle against search engines, not with them. The life of an SEO expert consists of constantly seeking ways to “trick” Google into thinking that people love your site, even if you’ve only had a few visitors (or have other, more financially related motives). Far too often, SEOers (that’s a word, right?) tend to find the quickest, dirtiest, and easiest ways to bring visibility to their sites, and forget that there’s actually a missing human element. Get big enough in a competitive vertical, and Google might pick your site to be analyzed by their engineers (I’ve seen giants toppled because of this).
It’s unlikely that you’ll ever actually trick a search engineer. But launching obvious link building campaigns can set off some red flags that bring negative attention to your efforts. So, what’s the best way to make sure that Google knows you’re not getting all natural links? Forgetting to add variety to your anchor text.
The State of Anchor Text
Anchor text is a puzzling thing to many new web marketers. Let’s say, for example, that you operate the site marketingdegree.net, and want to generate more traffic by targeting some keywords. What would you do? The phrase “marketing degree” seems to be pretty valuable, so we might target that alone. And that would make sense as many people would refer to the site like I just did above. With an exact match domain, the job is fairly simple and natural links are more likely to come in how I want them.
Now, let’s consider a different scenario. Let’s suppose I went a different route with a “brandable domain.” Google wanted to be more than a website (that’s why they didn’t pick searchengine.com). So, they chose a brand. Suppose I chose something like “Google.com” for my site in some alternate Internet universe. How likely would it be that everyone would link to me using the phrase “marketing degree?” Pretty unlikely unless I was already dominating the SERPs. People would link to me in all sorts of ways, from “click here” to “this site doesn’t agree with my opinion, however” as the anchor text. In fact, some companies have accidentally ranked for that anchor text – try searching Google for “click here” and you’ll find some pretty powerful players on page one (Adobe, Wikipedia, Apple, Mapquest and Yahoo!). When I got big enough, people would likely link to me primarily using “Google.”
Still, conversions matter. Adobe probably isn’t making any money by ranking number one in Google for “click here,” even though AdWords is telling me that I’m one of about 22,200 that searches for it every month and there is no advertising competition whatsoever for the term (jackpot right?). The chances of monetizing such a broad keyword phrase are slim (especially with all those heavy hitters dominating it in Google).
Adding That Variety
Anchor text for incoming links is vital to your success, but it’s not everything. You can think of links as having two different types of “juice” – the normal, delicious kind that passes reputation (called page rank by Google), and the just as delicious juice called “passing anchor text.” It’s far more complicated, but think of it like this:
- Any old link builds your site’s reputation with Google, and helps you rank slightly for all search terms relevant to your site’s content.
- Anchor text helps you rank for specific terms.
So why is it that so many beginning SEO enthusiasts set out on a link building campaign to build thousands of links using the same exact anchor text every time? Can you think of anything less natural? You can sit back and wait for the links to come naturally (like Google wants you to…), or you can add a little variety to your anchor text to avoid setting off any alarms.
First, consider the two juices of a link. As long as a backlink doesn’t come from the bad neighborhood of the Internet (spam land and porn, gambling, etc.), a link is pretty much a link. In other words, getting a link can never hurt you. Otherwise, every spammer in the world would be sending thousands of terrible links to their competitors’ sites to shut them down. This doesn’t mean you need to spend hours getting a link from a PR 0 site either though.
So feel free to mix up your anchor text – a lot. Think about all of the ways a person might reference your site and its content and write them down. How do you talk to people about your services? Furthermore, what value does your site offer?
Using the Long Tail for Anchor Text Ideas
Think of a nice long tail keyword phrase that you’d like to target, preferably one that sums up everything your site has to offer – luxury vacations in Egypt for senior citizens, for example. If you divide that long tail phrase into smaller phrases (luxury vacations, vacations in Egypt, senior citizen vacations, etc.), then come up with all of the variations for those phrases (vacation over 65, holiday in Egypt, Egyptian vacations, and so on), you have a nice list of natural anchor text for your link building campaign.
You’ve successfully made a connection to everything your site has to offer, without spamming the same anchor text over and over again. Your efforts look much more natural to everyone involved – the Google robots and humans alike. And don’t worry too much about not ranking for your targeted keyword phrase. Search engine results don’t work that way. After all, why would Google design a system that relies on unnatural activity to yield natural results?
You might even add a few odd anchor text links to make things squeaky clean, like “I love this site” or “good news for us all.” You’ll still get the link juice.
Finally, if anyone reading this has the guts, free time, and extra cash to try to get their site on the first page for “click here,” please let Trisha know so I can send you a batch of my almost world famous banana bread (only if you’re successful, please!). Unfortunately, I lack all three of my aforementioned elements to do so myself, but I have plenty of banana bread at the moment.
Final Note: I must make one thing clear for those that are about to leave an angry comment. We’re not discussing exact match domain names right now. If you have an exact match domain, adding a lot of variety to your exact match anchor text isn’t really all that necessary, except if you’re branching out to other keyword phrases. You spent enough money on the domain to impress Google already, and they’ll fully expect thousands of links to come to it using your website name as the anchor text.
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Andy Wallner is a freelance writer and web developer that specializes in providing information to students considering a marketing degree, or interested in online and offline marketing information. In his free time, Andy enjoys kayaking, playing trombone in a local jazz band, and learning CSS.
Read MoreAvoiding Former CoWorkers in San Jose
Sometimes it’s pleasant to see an old coworker… other times, it’s best to avoid them. Which is what I did at Search Engine Strategies last week in San Jose. I’m not necessarily proud of what I did, but I successfully avoided what could have been a rather awkward situation, so it worked out for the best.
I spent the majority of the day in the Social Media track of the conference, learning more about the inner workings of Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Wikipedia than I ever thought I wanted to know. Of course, one of the first things I did when getting back to the office was apply some of this and set up a Digg profile and a Technorati profile and an account on Del.icio.us. Since PsPrint doesn’t sell it’s content, I don’t really see Wikipedia as being that huge of an opportunity for us. But the others… well I’m shocked I wasn’t on them personally for awhile.
Now, my roots in social media lie in the likes of MySpace, message boards, and chat rooms. I’m not the seasoned internet user you’ll hear speaking at trade shows that’s been online since 1997… but that’s mostly because back in ’97 I was still writing history essays and doing math homework in High School. I’ve been online since about the time I got to college, Fall of 1999. Going away to college and having to make all new friends, I immediately found chat rooms as a place to connect with like minded people. A friend introduced me to Live Journal back in ’03 and I’ve been blogging ever since. When MySpace came around big time in ’05 I jumped on that bandwagon and haven’t looked back.
Has it really been 2 years on MySpace? How time flies. But, I digress. SES was a great show for me to attend. Very informative, and my favorite part was how organized all the panelists were. Everyone had a neat & tidy Power Point presentation that will be available online this week, so I barely had to take any notes. I’ve also decided that the next time I go to one of these shows and attend the educational panels I’m going to be bringing a laptop. Since there was really no need for me to take many notes, it would have been great to be able to surf the websites that the panelists talked about while they were talking about them. I’m all about multi-tasking, so getting some work done while learning is my ideal.
This is becoming an exciting time for me. Learning more and more about the field I’m working in and exploring social media marketing is really exciting me to be moving onward here at PsPrint.
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