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I think one of the best aspects of SEO is that it’s both cumulative and compounding in nature. It’s cumulative because every time I put a page on the internet it has potential to rank, bring me traffic, and make me money.

As long as I don’t let the domain expire or let it go stale with a lack of links, it stays on the web forever (basically) with very little maintenance. If I add 500 pages per year to across all my sites, the net I’m casting on Google gets a little wider with every single page I add.

Your Authority on Google Can Grow Exponentially

The compounding element of SEO comes from our ability to add pages and links within one domain, and with each new link and page, the entire domain becomes exponentially stronger.

So while my Google net is getting incrementally bigger each time I add content, the entire net is also becoming stronger and more effective every time any one of my pages gets new links. This compounding effect is why sites like this one can achieve high rankings for keywords they’ve never really targeted with nothing more than internal links.

So how can you enjoy the full compounding benefit of your SEO efforts? There must be hundreds of answers to that question, but the answer I’m offering today is deep linking. As you strengthen the individual pages of your site by getting them links, you increase your entire site’s ability to rank exponentially.

How to Drive Link Strength Deep Into Your Site

The real question, then, becomes “How do I build links to the individual pages of my site?” We’ve posted in the past about strong internal linking strategies and also the use of the related posts plug-in. Internal linking is powerful, but if your deep links are going to help the entire site get to a new level of authority, they need to come from other sites. So here are the two strategies that are guaranteed to yield results:

1. Blog Carnivals

For any of you not familiar with blog carnivals, they’re basically group writing projects hosted by sites as a way of sharing good content and community building. You can find carnivals relevant to your topic at the Blog Carnival website. It will walk you through the simple submission form you see below. What you’re going to do is submit a post of yours that best fits with the theme of the carnival.

The deep linking power comes from that fact that if the host of the carnival likes your submission and accepts it, you’ll get a link from that site directly to your post. And very often you’ll get another link to your home page. It’s not uncommon for authoritative sites to host these carnivals, so there are some quality links to be had if you’re willing to do the work of regularly contributing posts to the carnivals in your niche.

**Blog Carnival Bonus Tip**

On the submission form after you’ve pasted in the permalink you’ll often see a space for you to enter your name or the name of your blog. Find a way to get your desired anchor text into that name and it will make the link pointing to your homepage that much more effective for SEO.

Be warned - there are some carnival hosts who feel this is spam and will refuse your submission based on your use of a keyword as the name on your submission. Others will understand why you’re doing it, and as long as your submission is high quality and relevant, they’ll give you the link with your anchor text.

The big upside of blog carnivals is they usually give you both a link to the post you submit and to your homepage. They can also be a source for traffic and more links. I’ve had people find my other blog this way and like it so much they added it to their blog roll. That may not happen often, but it’s nice when it does.

The downside of blog carnivals is submitting to them can be time consuming and tedious. It’s a low leverage method for deep linking, but it’s a good way to get started when your site is newer. Eventually the goal is to have your content be good enough to attract links of its own (Court’s post on starting a blog has received over 1400 external links - a lot more than blog carnivaling will ever get me). At that point, submitting to carnivals doesn’t make sense anymore from an SEO standpoint, although you may still want to do it occasionally for community buidling purposes.

One last thought on Blog Carnivals: DON”T SPAM THEM. You’ll quickly ruin whatever name you’ve established for yourself if you aren’t submitting posts with the intention of contributing to the quality of the carnival. This can be a good supplemental link building strategy, but if you take it too far you’re not going to make friends.

2. Article Marketer

Yes, it’s our old friend Article Marketer. Sometimes Court and I feel like A.M. is the nerdy kid in high school that nobody else will talk to, but we know he’s cool, so we’re going to stick with him even if everybody else thinks he’s a loser.

So in this edition of Article Marketer Does Not Suck, I want to show you how to use the html Author Bio on the article submission form to give a link to both your home page and one of your subpages every time you submit an article.

It’s pretty simple. On the form you see where you can create the html author bio with up to two links. All you have to do is have one of the links (with your main homepage anchor text) point to your homepage, and use the other link (again with the anchor text of your choosing) to the page you’re trying to build. Repeat that process as many times as you like. Remember to vary your anchor text to avoid Google Bombing.

Here’s how it will look (sorry it’s so small):

And that’s it. Using this strategy I was able to get the ranking you see below for my ecommerce site. It’s a #9 ranking and the keyword isn’t particularly difficult, but it shows the power of linking to a subpage.

Now that page of my site not only ranks on its own, but it passes authority back to the rest of my ecommerce store. That’s the compounding effect of deep linking.

There are more deep linking strategies out there. What are your favorites? I’ve heard of people using squidoo lenses, hubpages, and obviously social bookmarking to accomplish the same goal. What have you tried and gotten results from?

(original article)