While writing a post, always try to link to some older posts with absolute paths

(i.e. use http://www.mapelli.info/tags/feed/feed-week/ don’t use /feed/feed-week).

This is a simple and effective tip valid both for your posts and your feed optimization that can help you in many ways:

1. Involving Subscribers

• If you have a link to one older post in your recent posts, you help your reader to explore some older article he may have missed.

• If one of your subscribers is reading your post with a feed reader, a click on the link will take him on your old post page, this means an additional pageview, and can turn into a comment or some additional in-site navigation.

2. Getting new visitors

• If your post is published in an aggregate feed, because of a partnership, Yahoo pipes or social news sites, a link to your site may bring you new visitors that can turn into subscribers. I found this really effective, because some of my posts like my article on Digg’s new auto-bury feature have been published by webpronews and I received a few visits from the links I put in the posts.

3. Fighting Splogs

• If your post is “stolen” by splogs, you can find them thanks to pingbacks and referral analysis, and report them to google or their hosting service.
• Each time a splogs republish your content, you win a backlink (ok, it’s not that much but it helps your technorati rating ;) )

4. Giving some more work to thieves

• If someone want to copy and paste your post on his blog pretending it’s his work, he will have to cut all the links to your old articles, and replace then with something that fits. If your links are deeply integrated into the post content it may require some work.

5. Optimizing Pagerank

• If you link to an older post, your current post will raise your old post pagerank, helping it appearing on higher SERP positions (for an introduction to pagerank see Pagerank Explained, if you don’t know what a SERP is you may read this introductional post)

Do you think there are other good (or bad!) reasons for deep linking? What have I missed in my analysis? Do you find it difficult to inter-link your posts?