Deep linking is the art of linking relevant keywords to related content within your own site. Essentially, you are leveraging your own site’s equity for gain.  What gain? In order to understand what is to be gained, one must first understand how links affect SEO.

Links and SEO

As I mentioned in my previous post regarding keyword density, SEO is so much more than just optimizing important segments of your website structure.  It has to do with calculations based on several different variables.  That doesn’t mean to ignore structural SEO, it just meanst that your job isn’t finished.

Included in those variables is the number of links your site, page, or post has pointing to it.

So, if I were to link out to a post written by my friend Ian Stewart on WordPress Child Themes, the next time Google crawls my site, it’s going to register that link as a “vote”, for lack of a better word, for his post, and associate that post with the keywords I used in the link.  So, in essence, I just voted that his post should rank high for the keyphrase “WordPress Child Themes”.

Make sense?

Deep Links and SEO

I’ll freely admit that self-referential links probably don’t count nearly as much as incoming, external links.  But they do help.

So, what do you need to do? Here’s what I do:

When I write a post, I don’t do any links at first.  I just write.  I find the external links that I want to use and keep them open in separate tabs.  Then, once I’m done writing and proofreading, I start filling in external links wherever I find it beneficial. Linking out is always a good practice, and doing 100% deep links could hurt you.

Then, I read over my post one more time, this time keeping an eye out for words or phrases that may be related to content I’ve written in the past.  For instance, if I mention the word “homepage”, I might link to the post I did called “3 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Homepage”.  Sometimes, I may even reword my sentence to get that link to fit with a more relevant (and more desirable) keyword or keyphrase.  So I may modify my sentence to include the words “homepage design” or “homepage optimization”.

For me, I want this series’ opening post (with links to all the posts in the series) to rank well for the search term “WordPress SEO”.  This is actually pretty difficult, given that there are much older, established sites out there with many, many incoming links that I have to compete with.  So obviously, good SEO and deep linking won’t be enough to put me at the top of the list.  As it currently stands, I’m ranked at the top of the third page for that search term. It won’t bring in thousands of visitors a day, but it will net me long-tail benefits.

And for less competitive search terms like “WordPress theme search engine optimization”, I just so happen to be #2 in the search results.  That’s not bad at all, given I’ve got very few quality links back to that article.  I achieved that ranking nearly 100% through good SEO and deep linking.

Don’t Overdo it

When most people discover deep linking, they tend to go crazy with deep linking in posts.  Let me encourage you not to do that.

Deep linking is great, but use it in moderation.  Here are some quick tips for deciding when to deep link:

1. Only Deep link if the URL is relevant to the phrase. Don’t force it!
2. Keep deep links to around 5 per post. Posts that are littered with links tend to look spammy.
3. Deep link, and link out to others at an even ratio. Look for ways to link to other bloggers.
4. Remember that deep linking isn’t just for SEO. It can drive deep traffic too.
5. Keep links short. Don’t link entire sentences.

Remember, this is about gaining strategic advantages, not huge leaps ahead.  Deep linking won’t work overnight, and it won’t land you on the front page for competitive keywords.  But it is just one more tool you can use to give yourself the upper hand in the SEO battle.

Related posts:

1. WordPress SEO – The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Theme Search Engine Optimization
2. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – META Descriptions
3. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Optimized Titles
4. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Google Sitemaps
5. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Indexing Control

Today, I want to begin this series of posts by introducing you to the concept of using a Sitemap to give Google a “roadmap” to your blog.

The plugin

I’m not normally a person that recommends plugins for functions that WordPress themes should obviously be handling.  But in some cases, template files just can’t handle a certain task that a plugin can.  This is the case with the Google Sitemap Generator plugin.

Every single WordPress installation that I want indexed by Google has this plugin installed.  In my opinion, it’s a must.  It gives Google a set if instructions for indexing your site, telling it what content is more or less important and how often to crawl.

The Process

The First thing you want to do is download, unzip, upload and activate the plugin.

The Next step is to configure the plugin, and although there may seem like a lot of options, it’s actually quite simple to configure.

What you need to do after activating the plugin is navigate to the “Settings -> XML-Sitemap” page in your WordPress Admin.  Once you have this page pulled up, you’ll see some basic Status notifications.  Don’t worry about these for the time being.  They’ll be important later when you check the status of your sitemaps.

Scroll down to the “Basic Options” section.  It should look something like this:

The options you have selected may look slightly different.  Feel free to research what some of these options mean, but for the most part, if you choose the same options I have chosen in the image above, you should be in a good WordPress SEO position.  Here are some of the more important ones:

Sitemap Files: You definitely want to have at least one of these selected.  It will be important for our next step in the SEO process.  You’ll need to be able to tell Google (and the other search engines, if desired) the location of your sitemap.  I also recommend, due to compatibility issues, that you do choose the “XML File” option.  Most servers can generate an XML file without problem.

Rebuilding Mode: If you update your content regularly, then you’ll need to have your sitemap rebuilt when you do.  Only choose the manual option if you use an external program to publish your content.

Update Notifications: Although the benefits of doing this haven’t been clearly shown, it can’t hurt to notify as many search engines as possible when you publish new content.

Advanced Options: The only option I would check here is the “Build the sitemap in a background process” option.  This allows you to publish a post without fear of waiting forever for the sitemap to regenerate.

Setting the Other Options

Most of the other options are preferential.  But, that doesn’t mean that they are inconsequential.  In my opinion, the options you choose here could be extremely important in letting Google know what you consider your best content, and therefore what content should be indexed most often and with the highest priority.

Additional Pages
If you have pages that reside outside the WordPress installation you happen to be working in, and you want them included in the sitemap, feel free to specify them here

Post Priority
I generally don’t like to give posts priority over each other. But if, for instance, the number of comments on any of your posts is a good indicator of the strength of that post, you may want to use one of the other options to give those posts with more comments a higher priority.

Location of your Sitemap File
I prefer the default here, but you’re welcome to choose a custom location. There is no adverse effect to doing so.

Sitemap Content
In most cases (especially for bloggers) there should only be three options selected here, Homepage, Posts, and Static Pages. There’s really no reason to include the other options unless you specifically want those things included. And because content tends to duplicate many times over in the various archives, it’s best to leave them alone. But we’ll cover that in a later post as well.

Change Frequencies
Answer these questions as honestly as you know how.

Priorities
This is really where you have the advantage … being able to specify what you consider the highest priority content! I normally give the homepage and posts the highest priority, followed by static pages. Everything else I give a low priority. Really, the majority of search engine traffic will land on either your homepage, single post, or static page. The real power of this section is the ability to deprioritize the non-important stuff like archives.

Finally …

Once you have all your options set, click to save the options.

So now that we have a sitemap up and running, all we need to do now is get Google to find our sitemap and start using it. That’s what we’ll cover in the next post. Don’t miss it!!!

Related posts:

1. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Google Webmaster Tools
2. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Indexing Control
3. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Optimized Titles
4. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Optimized Heading Tags
5. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Keyword Density

Your ID can now be found in your feedburner feed URL. For example, if your feed URL was http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MyFeedURL, then MyFeedURL would be your Feedburner ID. Easy enough? :-)

Feedburner is an absolute dream come true for a blogger. In fact, I would put in in the top 5 tools that every single blogger needs in their arsenal. It tracks the number of feed subscribers you have, it allows you to offer feed updates via email, and it even has professional site statistics now too! (all for free, mind you)

If you don’t have an account there yet, go there and get one … NOW!

OK, now that you have an account, there are a few things you need to know about feedburner.

1. My feedburner address

This is actually pretty simple, but for the sake of the absolute beginner, you feedburner address is chosen by you when you burn your feed. It usually looks something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeedaddress (where “myfeedaddress” is the unique feed string you’ve chosen).

2. My feedburner ID

This one is a little more tricky, but still pretty easy to discover. The first thing you want to do is go to the feedburner homepage and click “sign in”.

Next, you’ll want to put in your username and password.

Once you’ve done that, go ahead and click on the feed you want to find the ID for.

Once you’ve clicked the feed you’re interested in, take a look at your address bar. It should have a URL in it like this one:

Notice the string of numbers I outlined in red? THAT is your feedburner ID for that particular feed.

Copy it down and keep it for later. It just may come in handy :-)

While we’re in there…

Activate the Email Subscription Option

Feedburner also offers you the ability to let users sign up for your feed to be delivered to them via email. But the service must be active first. Here’s how to activate it.

Once you’ve logged in and chosen the feed you want to offer via email, click the “Publicize” tab. Now, on the left hand side of the screen you should see some options. Look for the “Email Subscriptions” link and click it.

Then, just activate it. Once you’ve done that, you may want to poke around in the options and see if there’s anything you’d like to change or customize. But once the email subscription service is active, you’re set to deliver you feed to anyone who signs up!

So What?

OK, this IS sort of an elementary tutorial, I know. It may not seem very useful now, but you’ll see soon enough that it was necessary. If you already knew how to do all this, just ignore this story :-)

Related posts:

1. Stripped Theme Released
2. ElegantBlue Theme Released!
3. 7 Must-Have Plugins
4. RockinBizRed Updated to 2.0
5. 5 Useful WordPress Functions You Didn’t Know Existed

In basic CSS format, you define a font for a website like so:

body {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 12px;
}

There’s really not much in the way of explanation here. You define a global font style in the “body” style section of your CSS. And if you want define a different font style for a different element, you can do that just as easily by following the same format as above.

You might have noticed the degrading failsafe I put in as a way to buy a little “insurance” in case your first choice isn’t available. If the user’s computer doesn’t have the Arial font (although the chances of that are slim), then it goes on to the second font in the list. If that’s not there, then it goes to the third. You get the idea.

The Setting

OK, for those who don’t know, let’s just say that you defined “Trajan Pro” (one of my favorite fonts, although not as a web font) as your default font in your stylesheet. The nature of the web is not like print. Just because you define a font as the default doesn’t mean that the user is going to see it that way. If the user doesn’t have that font installed on his or her computer, then they won’t see the font you’ve chosen for your website. If you haven’t defined a secondary font, then the browser will just revert to the default font … usually a common Serif font like Times New Roman.

So what font’s are safe to use?

I’m by no means saying this is a definitive list or anything, but here are some font’s I’ve picked up in my experience as “safe”.

• Arial – A basic Sans-Serif font. Most websites use this font because of it’s simplicity.
• Helvetica – A font very similar to Arial.
• Times New Roman – Yep, the default in Microsoft Word :-)
• Georgia – Like TNR, but with a little more character.

A couple more that I think are safe:

• Trebuchet MS – Pretty cool looking font. Good for headers. I use it for my headers here on this blog.
• Verdana – Doesn’t look great in anything above 11px font size.

That’s where my list ends, but for a few more options, check out this good page for a deeper explanation of everything, and a slightly longer list of safe fonts.

Sorry to burst your bubble if I did. I know there are lots of people who wish web design was as easy as print, but unfortunately your choice of fonts is limited. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still do great web designs. Make it work … make it fit. If you apply some good color choices and a good grid, font ends up not mattering all that much.

To be honest, I’m glad web fonts are limited. Have you ever seen a flier on a telephone pole that someone did in a word processor? I rest my case :-)

Related posts:

1. 3 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Homepage
2. Creating a “Blog Page” — With Paging
3. WordCamp Recap, Part 1
4. Know Your Audience: The Browser War
5. Serve IE6 Visitors the Default WordPress Theme

But just in the last few days, I’ve seen this site go from not ranking at all for the search term “nathan rice“, to now being #5. As you can see, my other 2 websites are ranking above this one for my name because they are way more established than this blog.

So, by leveraging the power of these other blogs, I was able to take this site from not ranking at all, to being #5.

My personal site, NathanRice.org, has a PageRank of 5, and RockinThemes.com has a PageRank of 6. This means that when I link to sites on either of these sites, Google takes it seriously. So if I use NR or RT to link to a website, the anchor text I use to link is going to be used by google to determine the ranking for that keyword.

And thus, by linking to this site with the anchor text, “Nathan Rice” or “NathanRice.net” or some other combination that includes my first and last name, I have effectively given this site a boost in ranking for that keyword.

That’s why people like to buy text links on high PageRank sites. It’s an immediate boost in ranking for the keyword they use.

That’s pretty cool stuff!

Related posts:

1. PageRank, Technorati, and Free WordPress Themes
2. Google PageRank Updated
3. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Google Webmaster Tools
4. Know Your Audience: The Browser War
5. Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Deep Linking