Valuable content within your Web site – whether it is permanent or transitory – can be highlighted to your visitors through prominent linking to guide people directly to the deeper pages of your site.
The practice of ‘deep linking’ or linking to specific pages of content from the front page of your Web site – bypassing intervening contents pages or category trees – can work on different levels to increase the availability and accessibility of your valuable content.
Firstly, visitors will automatically be drawn towards more prominent ‘featured article’ links more than regular, ordinary links, particularly if the alternative route to your content is through categorised sub-pages or catalogues.
Secondly, search engines – growing increasingly more sophisticated as time goes by, and as competition increases – will give greater emphasis to those pages that it finds linked ‘higher’ in your Web site as it descends through links to new pages. Feature links from your front page automatically serve to elevate the destination pages to a higher level of importance: instead of being a sub page linked from a category page, linked from an index page, the feature content becomes seen as part of the key content of your Web site.
Finally, by making regular changes to the articles or detail pages that are linked as ‘features’ from your home page, you can increase the apparent turnover of information within your site, drawing repeat visitors further into your site structure each time they visit. If you offer a range of services and products, for instance, by linking to a particular group of services one month, then a range of products the following month, you can draw visitors into the different areas of your site.
Deep Linking reaps rewards, drawing attention to key content and getting it noticed more often than it would otherwise be, if it were linked in the same manner as other content. Linking to specific content from your home page to highlight it to visitors and search engines alike will draw visitors deeper into your site, keep them there longer, and in the process, increase their chances of becoming customers.
Jon Wilson, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
jon.wilson@threespot.co.uk
http://www.notbob.co.uk
Jon Wilson is an independent writer, consultant and developer, bringing high quality internet services within reach of small businesses in a time effective, cost effective manner.
