Hi, I have a fairly new site, should i focus my efforts on building links to a single page (homepage) or to specific pages within the site? Also if you get a lot of links to your homepage, how do you pass the benefit of those links through to deeper pages within a site? thanks, j.
Its easier not to worry about that. The 2 pages involved in the linking should be similiar. Just put yourself in the end users shoes. If they click this link on this page where would they want to go? Do they want to go to the homepage of another site and dig through the site finding the answer, or do they want to go straight to the page? If you look at it from a someone browsing the internets perspective the answers will come to you.
i not worries so much about people using the links to come directly to my site. I more interested in what is better from a search engine point of view, to increase my SERPS e.g. Is it better to have 10 pages with 100 links, or 1 page with 1000 links?
If you just have links to your main pages, it looks pretty unnatural to SE and they will penalise you. At least some % of links must be dep links.
Beg to differ. You have no control over who links to you. Search engines do not penalise for incoming links.
I never really thought of that before. Most of my links go to my homepage. It guess it depends on the site, because my site would not make much sense to visitors unless they come in on the homepage. If they came in on any other page, they would have to find there way back to the homepage to find out about what we offer and what we are about. You gave me something to think about though.
If your site has several products or topics that are not similar, I'd recommend linking to both the deep pages and the homepage; however for a site that offers only a handful of products that are closely related, you will be in good shape to link to the homepage. It truly depends on the structure of your site's content. You have to ask yourself what you want your search engine traffic to see when they first get to your site for the keyword they used to get there.
Beg to differ, me too. Se want you to have no control over who links to you. They want it to be natural, organic. But if it is organic then some of your links will go directly to relevent pages. That is what SE are looking for. SE donot penalise for incoming links, per se, but they give a boost if your linking is organic.
Both homepage links and deep links should be part of your link building strategy. Most directory links will require them to be to the homepage. You can use articles you write, submit them to article directories and put a deep link in the resource box. That should get you started.
Getting links that point to internal pages will also do more to boost the rankings of that certain page in most cases. It is definitely a good idea to have a mix of both homepage and internal page links.
Deep linking is probably the most misunderstood technique of SEO. You can get better results with less links with a proper deep link campaign.
Besides, you might want to optimize different pages for different keywords. E.g. index.htm could contain a lot of "keyword1" words and most of your links pointing to this page could have "keyword1" in anchor text, and the same you can do for index2.html and "keyword2". This would help you to use more keywords for your website optimization (well, i't hard to use 1 page to optimize a website for 100 keywords at once, but 25 pages with 4 keyword per each page shuold be easier)