Increasing the number of inbound links to your website is a critical part of any SEO campaign. Since the search engines rate your website partially based on how popular it is (the number of back links you have), getting better and more back links to your website will help improve your rankings.

One critical element that is often overlooked in developing an inbound linking strategy is the importance of obtaining deep links to your website. A deep link is pretty much any link that goes to your website that does NOT point at the homepage. With deep linking, you want to build links to the important internal pages of your website. This will help improve the PageRank of these internal pages and get them indexed if they are not already.

Focus on deep linking when:

• Your homepage has a high PageRank but important internal pages have little or none (this may also be a symptom of a bad internal linking strategy)
• A good number of pages on your website aren't getting indexed by the search engines or have low PageRank
• You've optimized internal pages on your website for highly competitive search terms

As you would do with homepage link requests, you'll want to seek keyword-rich links from relevant websites for the internal pages on your website. Since most free website directories won't give you links to internal pages on your website, you may want to consider paying for links or exchanging links for these pages. Of course, the better and more useful the content is on your internal pages, the easier it will be to get good links.