Deep links

I've done fairly well recently climbing several pages up google with the majority of backlinks arriving at the homepage.

Should I be directing my new efforts back linking to deeper pages? (I have a small site of 10 pages). Or is it more beneficial to link to the homepage?

A natural link profile to Google is one where the incoming links are spread evenly across an entire website. If you link only to your home page, it appears to Google that your links are being artificially generated, like you are trying to manipulate SERP rankings. So spread the links, because spreading them around the ten pages will help boost the rankings of all of your pages, a lot more than it would if you pointed them to your home page only.

So what method gets my homepage to the top 5? Direct homepage linking, or as you say spread it around?

I was planning to start deep linking when I got into the top 5.

Natural links means they come to that area of your website that visitors love most or liked like anything. Even if they come to the homepage but are natural, they are all good.

Afterall you cannot control anyone to link to your specified page..Can you? Just keep your internal linking structure so that the links juice flows deep into the website by itself..

btw, I do not mind getting links to the inner pages of the website by other methods other than natural links but I keep them limited to 5 links at max in a month or so...

No you can't, but if people only link to the one page naturally, they're effectively transmitting the message that the page is lots better than all of the others, so Google won't take as much notice of these other pages. The ideal, I suppose is to have loads of fantastic pages that attract tonnes of links, then you can't go wrong.

I'd too spread the link 'love'.

It looks alot more natural giving you more kudos with the SE's and from a user point of view it much more accessiable.

From an SEO point of view if you have link to a specific page which contains a spefic toipic it means in theory you could cater for 10 different audiences.

Different audiences mean more visitiors.

I.E. Currently you've 100 visitors intrested in cars in general. Create links to different topics per page and you could have 100 visitors only intrested in car modification, 100 in car parts, 100 in car reviews, 100 in car sales etc.

I know it's easier said than done but when I'm creating sites for SEO I always try to offer as many 'entry points' for spiders to crawl, people to be intrested, and to keep content fresh.

Cheers Joe