Deep linking is a practice that many corporate blog owners do not practice, mainly out of fear that a reader will miss the front page of the blog, and possibly the advertising that is located there. However, deep linking, when used properly, can actually be very beneficial.

When you are considering traffic to your blog, it is vital to look beyond just how many unique visitors you are getting. One of the most important statistics to consider is how long each visitor stays on your site. For example, if you are seeing a lot of visitors that only visit one page, or stay for mere seconds, this may be indicative that you need to work on your content a bit.

One of the easiest ways to increase the length of time each visitor stays on your site, and thereby exposing them to more of your advertising and content, is to practice good deep linking. First, let’s go over the general principle of how this works. Let’s say that you were going to give someone a link to your site, when you know that they are interested in topic x. Do you give them the main page of your blog and then force them to search around for topic x, or do you point them in the direction of that exact page where they are going to find what they are looking for?

Web readers are scanners by nature, and if they are not seeing what they are interested in, they generally don’t want to take the time to hunt for it. Deep linking sends them to the exact page they are interested in, and provides them with an instant content fix. While they may not be visiting your main page right away, they are still getting the benefit of reading your content, and liking what they find.

You can take this to the next level, by practicing deep linking in each post. It is a good idea to keep a list of all the posts that you have made as well as their direct links. Anytime you write a new post that references a topic or something that you covered in one of these old posts, you can link to it.

A shortcut to this technique involves installing a plugin on your blog that will deliver related post titles at the end of each blog post you make. This is an incredibly effective way of increasing overall visit times and building up a dedicated readership.

The bottom line is, even if a reader ends up bypassing the main page at first, they will be much more likely to stay on your site if they like what they see. Try experimenting with deep linking and with related posts to see if your statistics on visit times improve. Chances are you should see a big difference in these numbers, especially over time.

Give deep linking a try today and see what kind of results you can get.

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Originally posted 2008-10-13 05:09:32. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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