Everyone wants a better ranking. Heck, we all know that that nice boost from position 8 to 5, or 2 to 1 for your targeted search term can mean a world of difference in the pageviews and clicks you receive, and that’s probably a metric you’re aggressively tracking. But how can you surpass the competition in your targeted search rankings?
External deep linking is something a lot of websites neglect, which can cause you to be at a big disadvantage with your SEO strategy. Websites spend too much time optimizing their home page to rank for their high level keywords, and send all external links to their homepage while neglecting their deeply indexed pages.
Benefits of external deep linking include:
- A more diverse link portfolio because the links pointing to your other indexed pages are likely to have other keywords associated with the links, therefore your top level domain will be more powerful because of the diverse links and because the keywords in those links are likely to be semantically relevant to the top-level keywords you are trying to rank for
- External links to other pages within your site increase your rankings for those medium- and long-tail keywords which increase your overall traffic
- More traffic from your other pages increasing in ranking means better top-level rankings because aggregate traffic is an important factor in your search rankings
Internal deep linking can help if you are finding it hard to gain external backlinks to your deeply indexed pages.
Creating more unique content is important too. This is certainly something that seems to be said too much by SEOs, but it’s true because there is a direct correlation between better rankings and more indexed pages, as well as volume of links. Of course, quality comes into play too, but we won’t complicate things too much with all of that right now.
More content can be really useful for your SEO strategy in a number of ways:
- More indexed pages show you are a more trusted source because you will have more content relevant to your niche and the keywords you are targeting
- More pages means more opportunities for links to those pages, and more deep linked pages increases the diversity of the links you receive
- As always, more pages mean more opportunity to target long-tail keywords and ranking for those keywords won’t be hard so your overall traffic will increase, and if your traffic increases, so will your search rankings
Making sure you are investing time and effort into external deep linking and more content creation will be important if you want to increase your search rankings. Do not just link to your homepage and try optimizing that only because you will notice that there is a ripple effect when you link to other pages within your website since all your rankings will increase. These benefits work best for websites that do not have many external links pointing to their inner pages. For websites like SearchEngineJournal where many links are pointing to deeply indexed pages rather than just the homepage and where new content is published each day, doing more external deep linking and adding more content would just be redundant.
