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