What are the most important pages on my site to get links to?

A: What you're referring to here is the deep-link ratio, or the number of links pointing to your homepage versus the number of links pointing to other pages on your site (also called your internal pages). Many sites neglect their deep-link ratio, focusing just on building links to their homepage. That's a big mistake. We've consulted with many clients who were being outranked by competitors who actually had fewer incoming links. Upon doing a link analysis, we find the client's site has over 90% of their incoming links pointing at their homepage, while their competition has about 40% of their links pointing at their homepage, with the other 60% pointing at internal pages. Those sites are ranking better largely because they have a higher deep-link ratio. Whenever you get a link to any page on your site, it helps to boost your entire site. The actual page being linked to experiences the greatest boost, but your overall site will also benefit. In short, that means that getting links to your internal pages will actually also help your homepage (and every other page on your site) rank better. Increasing your deep-link ratio is also important for a few other reasons. First, it makes your links look more natural. When people naturally choose to link to your site, it's often because they've found something that would be of interest to their readers, such as an article, product review, or something similar. This means they usually link directly to the internal page of interest, rather than the homepage. On the other hand, artificial link-building techniques such as buying or swapping links usually results in a link going directly to a site's homepage. A certain number of links to the homepage is natural, but if all your incoming links are pointing at your homepage, search engines start to get suspicious. Second, if you want to attract the widest range of search engine traffic, then it's important that your internal pages also rank well. For example, let's say your site is about personal injury. Your homepage may be designed to rank for personal injury attorney. However, your highest converting customers may be those who are searching for much more specific terms, such as automobile accident attorney or motorcycle accident attorney. Your smartest approach is to design a specific page for each of those terms, and build links to each of those pages. Your " automobile accident attorney " page should have lots of links pointing to it that say automobile accident attorney, your " motorcycle accident attorney " page should have lots of links pointing to it that say motorcycle accident attorney, and so on. Building targeted links to those specific pages will help them rank in the search engines for those terms, and the corresponding increase in the number of deep links to your site will also improve your homepage's ability to rank for the more general phrase personal injury attorney. In general, a higher deep-link ratio is better. Most sites that rank well for very competitive keywords have a deep-link ratio of around 30 or 40 percent. Of course, don't start removing links from the home page and pointing them at your internal pages. Leave those links alone, since they're what's helping your homepage do so well. Instead, start working on adding new links to your internal pages. You'll be surprised at the overall positive ranking effect this has on your site.