Improve SEO with Internal Anchor Text Links
Most anchor text SEO advice focuses on a link building strategy of generating more backlinks from external sites to yours. But, there are ways you can strongly improve your link love by using internal anchor text links within your site. In plain language, this means that you link from one page of your site to another, or to a specific section on one of your pages. Following are a few ways to improve your link quality and gain favor with both search engines and readers.
Improve Your Links
When Google indexes a page (or post) on your site, it also indexes all of the links on that page. The quality of those links count. Here is the anatomy of a well-formatted link that is rich in keywords:
<a href=”https://yoursite.com/keyword.html”>Keyword Anchor Text</a>
The portion in red is the URL of the link. The text in green are the words that will appear as a link.
Google picks up on the keyword in the URL, and then the same keyword in the text. This is link candy to Google while still being highly enticing and descriptive to your readers.
How Not to Make a Link
One of the worst things you can do for SEO is to use “click here” or some other non-descriptive phrase as the text you intend to link.
It’s also not a good to use too long a phrase in the link. A good rule of thumb is to use only the text in the sentence that best describes the link, not the whole sentence.
Here’s a good example of concise link text:
Visit the WordPress Training page for info on money-saving class packages.
Notice that only the page title is linked because it is rich in keywords and it gives the reader a clear indication of exactly what page they are visiting. (In fact, to increase SEO and reader ease, a title attribute was also used on this link. Hover your mouse over it and a little pop-up box appears with the page title too.)
Link to Page Sections
One of the most overlooked features of internal anchor links is using them to direct readers to specific sections of a page on your site. For example, if you visit BlogAid’s Resources page, you’ll see a few Quick Links at the top.
When a reader clicks one of these links, they are instantly taken to that section of the page. This is especially helpful for redirecting a viewer from a blog post to a specific place on a static page. For instance, if I write a post on ways retailers can engage their clients, I may want to redirect the reader to Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s Your Blog, Your Business as a great resource of practical tips with examples. If you click this link, you’ll notice that it takes you directly to the section on the Resources page that has Carolyn’s books.
Good Links Yield Good Results
Improving your link creation techniques and sprinkling useful internal links throughout your site will create a more enjoyable experience for your readers, keep them on your site longer, expose them to more of your offerings, and improve your SEO. That’s a lot of bang for the buck.
How to create Anchor Links and best SEO practices are a few
of the wonderful things you’ll get to do in BlogAid’s WordPress Training classes.
