One of the most fundamental design requirements for effective online marketing, SEO, and traffic building is to allow deep linking direct to almost any page on your site.

The two biggest enemies of deep linking are frames and sites that operate from one container page, which is very common with Flash only sites.

This causes quite serious problems because all inbound links, including search result links, dump you in at the front door. This forces visitors to navigate through to find the information they are looking for, something which impatient users are reluctant to do.

With most well designed Web sites, search links and other deep links take you straight to (or near to) the information you want.

Not being able to link to a suitable landing page, also hinders online marketing initiatives such as email marketing and paid advertising.

The problems:

  1. Search engine visibility is poor due to lack of indexable content.
  2. Users cannot bookmark individual pages.
  3. You cannot link to a specific page in a blog post or from a referral link on another site. Visitors must enter at the front door and hunt around for the information they are looking for.
  4. It’s not possible to email links to particular pages. Again, you have to start at the home page and work it out.
  5. Email marketing campaigns cannot deep-link to relevant parts of the site. Again, visitors get dumped at the front door.
  6. PPC and paid advertising cannot link to a suitable landing page which can adversely affect their performance.
  7. With frames, pages can get indexed on search engines but remain orphaned from the rest of the site when viewed without the containing frameset.

Don’t believe that forcing visitors to start at the home page is a good thing. In most cases, this is an added frustration which will cause users to bail out when they don’t find the page they expected after clicking on a link.

Without deep linking, sites experience poor visibility on search engines and lose out on a wide range of other traffic generating sources. This means fewer visitors, less traffic, restricted e-marketing opportunities and ultimately, reduced levels of business.

There is no reason to use frames these days. The many alternative methods include: back-end scripting, templating engines, frameworks, server side includes and even template-capable source code editing tools for smaller static sites.

Flash sites can also be designed to allow at least partial deep linking, so there’s no reason why lavish Flash sites can’t support deep linking where it’s needed.

So, deep linking is an essential enabler for driving traffic to a Web site. Incorporate this into your design and build process, but if the mistake has already been made, it is possible to deep-link enable existing framed or Flash sites without resorting to a total re-build.