I have a website with lots of articles on various different niches. My articles target various long tail phrases, and I want to improve their ranking for these phrases. It is directly to the articles themselves I believe I'd get most of my visitors. Is deep linking to each of these articles the way to go to get them to rank well, or will building a lot of links to the index page help a lot as well? The name of the site itself doesn't have anything directly to do with the topic of the articles. Is say 1 link to each of my 100 articles better than 100 links to the main page? Will getting lots of links to 10 of my popular articles, help my 90 least popular articles rank better? All links help of course, but I'd like some input on what I should focus on, thanks.
Deep back-linking is great, and probably does the most for your individual articles. Backlinks to your home page are good too. Importantly, make sure to set up the right content structure on your site: 1. Use a flat directory structure: example.com/article.html instead of examle.com/dir1/subdir5/subdir10/article.html (i.e. minimize the number of slashes in the URL) 2. Link to your selected, most important articles and categories directly from your home page 3. Make sure your home page is linked to from everywhere 4. Make sure your individual pages link back to the corresponding category page.
all good advice you should have links to your home page as well as to your articles. It might appear unnatural to Google if you had only links to articles, and none to the home page. If you have a lot of articles I'd recommend interlinking between related ones with anchor text, with either a "related articles" plugin, or just manual in-article linking.
Thanks for the tips. I'm using the wordpress structure for the website, so I can easily put up as many articles I want on the front page, right now there are about 20 there. I am using the flat structure like you suggested. All categories are linked to from the front page, and I got the 20 most popular articles linked to as well. I'm not using the related posts plugin right now though, but maybe that would be a good idea too. Anyone got a good related post plugin for wordpress to recommend? Having lots of articles it would be easier to find a good plugin that does this automatically.
Deep link is good thing for PR. However, you should also have links pointing toward the main page of your site. Also, use different anchore text for your links point towards your site. Using single anchore text will not be a better idea
I have found deep linking to inner pages more effective for bring a site and those pages up in rank for many of my targeted keyword phrases. You should still consider linking to you main page too. I usually have a ratio of about 3-1, 4-1 depending on the niche.
I don't think linking to 10 articles will help the other 90. You may end up getting traffic from the 10 to the 90, but I don't see it improving your ranking.
ok, linking to one specific article will provide 100% link juice to that article(call it x) , and (assuming every article links to home), the benefit to home will be: f(x) / #links = aka some function of x divided by the total number of links on the article page basically, a link to one article will benefit the home page, as well as each article. the amount that it benefits will have a lot to do with your site's architecture.
Yeah, I agree with a lot that was said. I would interlink between relevant articles. I think it is important to have a fair amount of more links going to the home page because that would be more natural.
If your main domain name itself has not much relation with the inner pages content, plus you want your inner pages to be ranked well for each keyword its optimized. Then I would recommend you to focus on build deep link for your inner pages instead of just homepage. Ratio should be around 70 / 30 for now.
Very well descibed,, But can u plz explain the first point as i couldnt get that how we can avoind tha structure dir1 / subdir2 ,as its default setting. I hope u got ,waht i mean.
Deep linking is a good idea for your website. Focus on the keywords of the inner pages to be optimized as well as link the homepage to some important and related articles.
70/30 sounds like a decent ration, will focus on building deep links and see how things goes. Already have a ton of links to the main page as it's been submitted to many directories.
After a suitable PR rank (like 3 or more), I've read that about 60-70% of all link building should be deep linking