Loading ...Figuring out where you want to put your internal links for search engine optimization is difficult enough. The next challenge you face, when planting your internal architecture, is that of crafting appropriate anchor text. Anchor text is important for your hyperlinks as it tells the search engines, and your site’s users, what to expect from the page to come.
Choosing the right anchor text can help you to boost the relevance of the page you’re linking to. There are plenty of mistakes it’s easy to make with link anchors as well. It’s important to know what not to do. You can talk about linking with our SEO experts at SEO Consult Australia. Here are a few mistakes to be wary of when planning your link anchors:
- Failing to explain the link. Sometimes, in the excitement of directing a reader to a new page, sites forget to let the reader know where they’re going to. Simply linking with ‘funny stuff!’ is not enough. The link needs to enable the reader to guess where they’re going. To test your anchor text, it can be useful to have a friend look over the link and say where they think it would leave.
- Over-linking keywords. Keywords are a good choice for link anchor text in search engine optimization. They are not the only choice for link anchor text, nor should link anchors always be used on keywords. It’s true that a hyperlink is a good way to highlight keywords on your page. This doesn’t mean you should link from every keyword instance in your content. Once is enough. Anything more will annoy your site users and possible trip search engine spam filters.
- Choosing the wrong keywords. A common beginner’s mistake is to link from keywords that are relevant to the current page. Links should use the keywords of the linking page. For example, if your current page’s keyword is ‘puppy food’ but the page you’re linking to has the main keyword of ‘puppy health’, you should use ‘puppy health’ as the link anchor. Link anchor text is about boosting the relevance of the linked-to page. This applies to your off-page links as well.
- Using everything as a link anchor. Sometimes, thankfully not often, you come across a big chunk of blue underlined text. It can take a little while to realise that the whole chunk is being used as an anchor for a link.
Using large chunks of text as link anchors might seem like a good idea when you really want to squeeze lots of keywords into your links. It is, however, an unequivocally bad idea. Not only does it go completely against the conventions of linking, which may use up to ten words maximum for link anchors, it looks dumb. It makes your content hard to read, meaning that it will put off your site’s users. The extravagant number of words involved won’t impress the search engines, either, who are likely to ignore such a preposterous link.
Related posts:
- How to link content properly
- The elements of a link
- How anchor text can sink your site
- The lowdown on links
- Watch out for link penalties
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