Getting lots of high quality links to your website is essential for a good search engine rank, especially if you are targetting competitive keyword phrases.

Most people concentrate on getting links to their home page (index page), but it is good practise to also get some deep links. 

So, what is deep linking? A deep link is simply a link to a page on your website that is not your home page. It could be a link to a product page, a link to your blog or a specific blog post, or a link to another internal page on your website.

Getting a mixture of links to your home page and to other pages on your website looks much more natural than just getting link to your home page and it will also help you to get a better ranking for your internal pages as well as your home page. For these reasons it is essential to include deep linking as part of your overall SEO strategy.

Here are some ways that you can get deep links:

1. Use social bookmarking services to bookmark internal pages or blog posts on your website. Many bookmarking service will provide you with a do follow link back to your site and you can easily bookmark a page to multiple services at the same time by using a service such as OnlyWire.com
2. Link Internally within your site or blog – make sure you have a good navigation system within your website. This can include site menus and also linking back to internal pages from your home page or from other pages and blog posts where relevant.
3. Include a deep link in your author resource box when distributing articles. I like to include 2 or 3 links in my author resource box when I distribute an article. I usually include a link to my home page + one or two deep links to internal pages on my website.
4. Use deep linking in your blog comments. When you leave a comment on someones blog consider using a deep link rather than your home page link. It may be appropiate here to leave a link to your blog or a relevant blog post.
5. Exchange links with other webmasters or bloggers and ask them to link to one of your internal pages rather than a home page.
6. Use deep links in forums. Most links allow you to have one or more links to your website in your forum signature. You don’t have to link directly to your home page – you could link to another relevant internal page on your website. You could also include a link to a relevant page in a forum post, but be careful not to spam.
7. Paid Directory Submissions – some directories allow you to include deep links. However, these are usually restricted to paid submissions.

Hopefully this answers the question what is deep linking and gives you a few ideas of how you can get deep links to your own website.

Get more tips for improving your search engine rank in my SEO Ebook

Building good quality backlinks is essential if you want to push your website higher in the search engine results.

A backlink is a link to your website and counts as a “vote” of confidence towards your site. The more important the site that is linking to you, the higher the weight of your backlink.

One of the best and easiest ways to get backlinks is by writing articles for SEO. 

If you are not a writer, don’t panic… you don’t have to be a professional writer to benefit from this technique. You just need to be able to write 400-500 words on the topic of the website that you are promoting. If you can’t do this, then you can easily get some articles written for you for around $10 an article.

The main benefit of writing articles for SEO is that you can add an author resource box to the end of your article and include 2-3 links back to your website. Some article directories also support HTML and allow you to include your keywords in the link text (anchor text) as well. There are thousands of article directories on the internet but from my experience the best ones are:

• http://www.ezinearticles.com
• http://www.goarticles.com
• http://www.articledashboard.com
• http://www.ideamarketers.com
• http://www.searchwarp.com

If you don’t have much time available just submit your article to the above 5 directories and you will benefit from good backlinks and visitors.

If you want to speed up your article submission and submit your article to a wide range of article directories and ezine owners, you may want to consider using an article submission service or software.

If you write articles for SEO on a regular basis you will see a noticable difference in your search engine rank and you will also get the benefit of branding your own name, company name and website.

You have probably already heard of reciprocal linking, where two websites link to each other for mutual benefit, but what about three way linking?

Three way linking can easily be explained in the example below:

 You have three websites – website A, website B and website C.

• Website A links to website B.
• Website B links to website C
• Website C links to website A

As you can see, there is no direct reciprocal link here. Each website is linking to another website, but getting a link back from a different website.

The reason for doing this is because reciprocal links can easily be detected by search engines as “unnatural” links, therefore you won’t get as much benefit from a reciprocal link as you will from a one way link. Doing a three way link exchange makes this look more natural as site A is linking to site B, but getting a link back from site C.

If you decide to use three way linking as a strategy for link building I would recommend only linking to websites that are related to your own website and ensuring that your backlink is coming from a site that is also related. By related, I mean the same theme. So don’t link your home business website to someone’s dieting website.

How do you set up a three way link?

It is easy to set up a three way link if you already have two or more related websites of your own. You can email a webmaster and propose a 3 way link exchange. The disadvantage of this is that it is a manual process and it can be difficult to keep track of your links and be sure that the other webmaster has kept his or her link to your website in place.

Another strategy is to use a three way linking service such as 3 Way Links. This service allows you to automatically set up three way links with other websites. All websites are manually reviewed so you don’t need to worry about linking to bad neighborhoods.

Three way linking is definitely a strategy that you should consider using as part of your overall linking campaign along with other methods such as article distribution, forum posting, directory submission and press releases.

Visit 3 Way Links for more information.