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Originally published in SiteProNews, December 21, 2007

Why overlook the beautiful garden of latent links that are available from several of your very own buried internal pages? With a menial investment of time and a bit of pruning to remove a few semantic weeds, you can revitalize your website via deep links and give all of your pages a serious boost in the SERPs. Simply put, it’s like link insurance to procure additional sweat equity in your pages.

This better be good, for your sake

When it comes to building valuable inbound links for your site, don’t overlook older established (6 months and up) content for a current link building campaign. Older pages are well on their way for establishing Trust Rank, which can put your whole site over the top (if the spiders only knew).

Spiders and Deep Links a Pure Win/Win Strategy

Using your blog to create deep links can reinvigorate all of the content lodged deep within your pages. Why have a few pages in the lime light for search engines spiders when you can unleash the spiders to feast on all of your content. Deep links have a profound impact on rankings, they can (a) like a ping, invite the spiders to diner, if you have made changes to entice their appetite and (b) accelerate the indexing time for content deep in your pages tenfold.

Think of search engines spiders like amped up reporters with a tireless ambition to keep abreast of the the latest scoop. Fickle indeed, if they find one piece of code that does not ingest well, they will bounce to the next site in line for a better flavor of the day.

So, before you invite them to visit, set the table for your content by making sure you give your pages a quick touch-up to make them news worthy.

Here’s a few tactics worth noting:

1. Change relative links to absolute links - If you have any relative links (such as /filename.html vs. http://www.domainname/filename.html) on your site, make them absolute links to strengthen the internal site architecture and allow your pages to share their latent ranking potential with each other like a self referring dynamo. We have used this method (in less competitive markets) to secure long-term search engine rankings that just keep climbing and climbing and climbing…until you have time to build some external links.
2. Cap your outbound links per page - Perform a link audit (next tip) where you determine if (a) are you bleeding a page dry from using too many outbound links. If you cap it to 5-10 per page for a long page or 3-5 outbound links (even if they are to other pages in your site) this will produce relevance for the anchor text in the link on that page; and (b) if your not targeting the keywords in the anchor text in the h1, title or description of the page or for a site wide term, then don’t use it, as it only dilutes your SEO.
3. Perform a Link Insurance / Relevance Makeover - Perform an audit on your description tags for your pages you are deep-linking to (prior to linking). By keeping the descriptions succinct 10-18 words, each of those terms can rank in the SERPs when the spiders catch wind of your new changes. Try to use buzzwords or keywords that have traffic (using keyword research) for writing your descriptions (or adding a fresh paragraph). By this simple exercise, pages that you wrote off can gain exposure and search visibility as every page on your site can become a keyword with the right amount of links or with the right query.
4. Use Google Webmaster Tools to look at your internal links and make sure that your pages are somewhat proportionate, no reason to be stingy, pass the link love around. One idea is, if you see any pages under 10-20 links, even them out from using your blog to build some quality back links to those deep folders.
5. Finnigan begin again - Rinse and repeat with other aged pages after you have given them a quick make over with new content, a link audit and a fresh new (relevant) description. Also, if the title tags had irreverent keywords that were targeting the less competitive terms, take out the garbage and and go for the competitive keyword summits. As pages age, they grow stronger if you water them and feed them plenty of back links.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

 

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