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Why should you use deep linking?

To make your site user friendly it would be prudent to arrange the layout of each page to give the visitor a brief idea of where they have arrived, a link back to the home page and obvious links to the proceding pages. That way a vistor who arrives a a page directly is able to navigate your site without difficulty.

Deep linking enhances usability because it is more likely to satisfy users' needs. Generic links, such as links to a company's homepage, are less useful than specific links that take users to an individual article or product.

Now that we finally have effective Web-wide search engines, users will likely use them more often to locate deep links to a specific solution, rather than starting out at a company's homepage.

Supporting Deep-Link Users

Here are two guidelines for enhancing usability for users who enter your site at interior pages:

• Tell users their arrival point, and how they can proceed to other parts of the site by including these three design elements on every single page:
  • Company name or logo in upper section
  • Direct, one-click link to the homepage
• Orient the user relative to the rest of the website. a breadcrumb trail is usually the best way to do this. Also, include links to other resources that are directly relevant to the current location. Don't bury the user in links to all site areas or to pages that are unrelated to their current location.
• Don't assume that users have followed a drill-down path to arrive at the current page. They may not have seen information that was contained on higher-level pages.

When to Avoid Deep Links

P> It's easy to prevent search engines from deep linking to a specific page. Simply include the following meta-tag code in the HEAD part of the page:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">

Well-behaved search engines will exclude any such page from their databases.

Deep linking is your friend: It gets users to their preferred destination as quickly as possible. Thus, you should only use the "noindex" meta-tag for pages that users should never visit first.