If you own your online content and routinely link to blogs or websites, it is important to optimize the link text so your readers know why they should click a link and for Google to know why you’re linking to it.
Exampling what I mean, look at the following paragraph that I wrote in a blog post six months ago about a Newburyport bakery claiming to be the Best in Country:
After reading Gillian Swart’s love of lattes at Greta’s Great Grains on her blog here and here, I realized I didn’t have this link to the bakery on my online restaurant list over on the right. I’ll add that shortly.
Over the summer, when I read about search engine optimization I realized I should have written such content more effectively, as highlighted in the below rewrite. Pay attention to the link text:
After reading Gillian Swart’s blog about her love of lattes and cinnamon buns at Greta’s Great Grains and their healthy competition with other Newburyport coffee houses, I realized I never visited the official website of Greta’s Great Grains.
It comes down to relevant linking. Do you see the difference? It’s vitally important that you do. Viewed top to bottom, aren’t you more hungry to click the second set of links than the first?
The context of “click here” (which every online content creator has done at one point or another) is meaningless. Why should someone click here? is the question you must ask when devising the link text.
When clicking to people’s blogs or company websites, try not to include link text of only the person’s or company’s name. For instance, don’t link to ariwriter.com with the text “Ari Herzog” but use contextual keywords for your readers (and search engines) to grasp the relevance of the link.
If nobody knows why you’re linking to me, why should they click your link?
Rather, I suggest that when linking to my blog at the root level (unlike a post where the context is clear, such as this one about optimized link text), you could use relevant phrasing, such as “Ari Herzog, who provides advice on social media.”
Does that make sense?
Related posts:
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
978-558-0008
ConvoTrack
{ 5 comments }
This is great, Ari. Thanks for sharing. It’s something I didn’t discover for years, and I am sure many will benefit from this post. Terrific info.
We can never have enough reminders about this. You’ve given a great example of contextual linking–something that I’ll refer to as I seek to improve my use of that tool. Thanks!
Good SEO tip. I don’t understand though when bloggers uses full sentences to link outside to other blogs. I guess you can say they are taking the time to help someone else so it doesn’t really matter. But from an SEO point of view it doesn’t necessarily help as much as it could with a solid keyword. I guess there is more direction when a mutual link exchange is involved so you can further target the text to the link better.
Hi Ari – That’s a great idea. I really want to know what I’m clicking on when I visit a link and the keyword phrase is a lot more useful than here and here. I’ll have to watch out for this on my own site.
Thanks!
Kim Woodbridge´s last blog post..(Anti) Social-Lists 11/2/08
@Craig: I’m not focusing on search engine optimization, remember. That’s part of it. The other part is for people. In both cases, link text saying “here” tells the person and the search robot that the link is about “here,” and not, say, “green eggs and ham.”
Comments on this entry are closed.