Link differently for great SEO results

Link building is a big part of any site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Links are necessary for a number of reasons.
Linking to other web sites shows announces to them that you respect them enough to link to their content, with a little luck a little reciprocity will work its magic and they’ll link back to you and yours, either automatically (WordPress reciprocal magic) or manually. If they link back to you if shows there is some respect there and builds reputation to your site.
Linking in and out of sites gives Search Engines a path to travel too. Search engines like to go a couple of links deep on each page to check out relevancy and what it is linking to and what is linking to it.

A link is a link though, right? Well, no, it’s really not. Read on…..

SEO link building is a strategy, it’s a practice, it’s something you need to do and keep doing.

Deep links link to pages within a site, not just the top page of the site. They’re called ‘Deep links’ because they link deep into a site. There are internal and external deep links.
External deep links bring visitors to your site, internal deep links keep your visitors within your site and keep them looking around it.
External deep links look good to search engines (incoming reputation), internal deep links make it easy for search engines to find even more of your content.
For example, a simple link would be like this – TechBurgh – which links simply to the TechBurgh Blog at TechBurgh.com. a more complex, deep link would be – SEO Tips, tricks and techniques –  which links to the SEO category in the TechBurgh blog. Notice that the text being linked was a little more descript too. The text being linked described the subject matter being linked to. You can go deeper and link to actual posts within sites. Known in the business as an “Understandable anchor text”.

Think about what you’re linking to. Think about your subject matter. For example, this post is about SEO techniques, yes I can link to other sites who talk about SEO stuff, I can link to search engines, search engine blogs, SEO companies, as well as information on links and how to format them, sites that tell how to format HTML correctly for links, and more. Think outside your current subject matter but still relevant.

Think about deep links when you’re commenting on blogs. If you happen to put links in comments (some do, some don’t) how about adding a deep link?  Take visitors the most direct route to your site and where you want them to go on your site.

Consistency helps. Get a white board (or piece of paper) and mark down your linking structure. Does it make sense to you? is it consistent?

It’s all about common sense really. If you’re promoting a book you wouldn’t say “Hey, go to Barnes and Noble and look for a book on people” just link you wouldn’t direct a link to the top page of your site and hope someone find what you want them to. Try “Go to Barnes and Noble and ask for a book called Trust Agents” (do you see what I did with the links there too?)

Essentially, there should be a number of different links on each page of your site.

• A ‘shallow’ link, linking to your home page.
• An internal deep link.
• An external Deep link.
• A link to your site map.