If you use a link building strategy to drive traffic to a deeper page on your site, it’s important to plan carefully. If you’re running a sale or special promotion with an expiration date, you don’t want users to find outdated content on these pages after the event has finished. If you push to get links for a sales page to increase your conversion rates, you need to modify that page once the sale is over.

Simply modifying the page to say “Sorry, the sale is over!” is weak. You know search engine users will find that page—even if it’s only one or two clicks per month. So why waste the good SEO value of that page when you could be directing traffic to an active part of your site? Any pages which have received inbound links as part of your latest promotion have value long after the event, so modify those pages to encourage readers to move on to the active part of your site.

Some people are tempted to use a 301 redirect on these pages to automatically take readers somewhere else on the site. This may seem like a good idea, but think of the first impression it gives to a newcomer. Would you want to spend any more time on a site discovered in this way? You clicked on “Big 50% off sale at Harry’s” from the search results, but what you got was a redirect to something else. Instead, use internal linking to guide those visitors to the latest and greatest.

Joe Wallace is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Content Marketing, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.