How To Add Depth to Your Content through Hyperlinking
Techniques to express ourselves in blog form range from using compelling images, to descriptive wordplay, and other complementary media. With every new digital form of data comes a new way to visualize and represent it across the blogosphere in hopes of portraying a colourful story. One way to achieve this is through hyperlinking. (Also see: deep linking).
Deep Linking: Next Level Hyperlinking
By Anneliese Herbosa
'Deep linking' is essentially linkception (except easy to understand and follow). Facts, tactics and best practices courtesy of [Neil Patel](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/author/neil-patel/) via [Search Engine Journal](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/).
-
It's all about internal linking.
By Anneliese Herbosa
So basically, you link internal pages to other internal pages…and you get other sites to link to these internal pages, and so on and so forth.
-
What can it help reduce and improve?
By Anneliese Herbosa
It can reduce visitor [bounce rate](http://blog.kissmetrics.com/bounce-rate/) while improving [page views, time on site](http://blog.quiet.ly/industry/sessionduration_vs-_pageviews/) and even subscriber numbers.
-
Deep page > Home page
By Anneliese Herbosa
Sending traffic to your home page is not a good [SEO strategy](http://blog.quiet.ly/product/quietly-optimizes-seo) for most sites. By not directing visitors to specific pages, they're not getting the relevant content they want so they abandon the page!
-
Raise the authority of the entire site
By Anneliese Herbosa
If all you did was optimize and send traffic to your home page, then you might have a home page with a really high authority rank…but the rest of your pages had little or no [authority](http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority).
-
Increase your site’s overall relevancy
By Anneliese Herbosa
Search engines will crawl then index your page based on keywords. If you’ve linked to [keyword-rich anchor text](http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/keyword-rich-inbound-links) from another page, engines like Google will consider it an authority and rank it high.
-
Increase your site’s overall visibility
By Anneliese Herbosa
Deep links -both from your site and other sites- will help search engines follow the path through your site to these hidden pages and making them visible by indexing them.
-
Turn new visitors into returning ones
By Anneliese Herbosa
Deep linking will drive your visitors to relevant pages that satisfy their goals, thus reducing the chances they’ll bounce and increasing the chances that they will become dedicated readers.
Hyperlinking is a common blogging practice that involves selecting certain text or strings of text and directing your readers to an external source to supplement that text. Where you redirect your readers depends on what aspect of the blog post you would like to draw your readers’ attention to for additional reference points.
Here are some examples on how a mundane-seeming phrase can suddenly appear to be a bit more enticing with the addition of strategically placed hyperlinks:
- The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. – Here, the nouns or subjects are called out.
- The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. – Here, the adjectives describing the subjects are pronounced.
- The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. – Here, the main verb or action is being underlined.
- The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. – Here, the preposition is emphasized.
Whether it be accentuating a subject, characteristic, or action, you can get pretty creative with what you choose to hyperlink. As seen in the examples above, hyperlinking is basically the equivalent of putting a strong emphasis on certain parts of a sentence (think Chandler Bing and his diction). By purposefully hyperlinking text, you are adding colour to a word or phrase and encouraging the reader to explore that term or group of terms further. Not only does it make what you write carry a bit more weight in terms of added context, but it also shows your readers that you, as a savvy blogger, took the time to include reference points to enhance your readers’ content consumption experience.
In the spirit of promoting this micro-blogging technique, we have added a new feature within Quietly which takes the same form.
Now, when you want to include a supplementary link to add context to your list items, you can browse through Bing-powered web results built right into Quietly to include in your list. Here’s how:
- Type in the subject you choose to search for
- Click on the globe icon (labelled as “Search for a website” upon hover)
- You will be presented with web results to choose from. Double click on the image or click on the green Confirm button to make your selection.
- Quietly will then scrape the data (photo if available, information, link) and include it in your item description.
Just as hyperlinking allows you to breathe life into selected text when blogging, adding links to your Quietly lists helps breathe life into your media-rich slideshows.
Featured image via Flickr.