A deep link is a hyperlink to an internal page of a website (as opposed to the homepage).

Deep linking is important because search engines take into account a site's deep link ratio or DLR (that is, the number of internal links to the total number of links to your site). This is because if people are deep-linking to your site, it's a good hint to search engines that you have lots of relevant and unique content on your site which people are interested in. A link to an internal page is, generally speaking, worth more than a link to your homepage. A deep link ratio of about 20% is a good start. Some websites have much higher deep linking ratios: Wikipedia, for example, has a DLR of 98-100%, because the vast majority of traffic to the site is to internal pages, which people are likely to post links to as explanations, definitions and for other purposes.

This is worth bearing in mind when you are asking for links to your site, and when you yourself are posting links as well, on forums and in other places. Lots of interesting content will, of course, naturally improve your DLR, as your visitors find your site useful and link to points of interest. Social bookmarking sites are likely to boost deep-linking considerably in the future.

Deep linking has come under some criticism, particularly before it seemed to play a significant part in search engine optimisation. Some companies complained that other webmasters were passing off the companies' content as their own. However, now that deep-linking influences search engine results, you should not have to worry about deep-linking to other sites.

You can calculate the DLRs of the top ten sites for a particular keyphrase on WeBuildPages. You can calculate the DLR of any specific domain on ekstreme.com (this tool gives rather erratic results at times). You can also calculate your DLR (semi)manually using the instructions given on Dean Hunt's Buzz Marketing.

NB: Deep-linking is different from inline- or hot-linking, when you embed the content of someone else's web page into your own. While there's nothing illegal about embedding images and other material from others' websites (some sites, such as YouTube, actively encourage it) unless there are explicit copyright instructions not to do so, it is not recommended, because you will have to rely on the original website to maintain the content. Ultimately, you may end up with a broken image link on your website, which is far uglier than a broken hyperlink. If you do inline-link, make sure you credit the original owner.

By Brian Jackson

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