With the rise and rise of content marketing, blogging has become an essential part of your digital marketing campaigns. This is because the process of putting together blogs for your website allows you to use the keywords that you’ve selected for your website many times over without anything seeming keyword stuffed or unnatural.
Anchor text is the text which a link is inserted into in a particular piece of writing on a website. There are many reasons why it plays a significant role in blogging. In this article, we’ll look at what are some of the golden rules that should be followed with respect to making use of anchor text in your blogs.
Why is anchor text important?
To get a higher page rank for your website you ultimately need to insert as many natural links – between your pages – as possible throughout your blog. This practice gives Google an idea of how your site is organised and also shows them what the most valuable content on your site is. This is because they see that the more links a particular page has pointing at it, the more valuable and useful it is seen to be. The more popular pages are ranked highly on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
The anchor text for a particular link needs to relate to the page that it is linking to. For example, the anchor text “content marketing” can’t link to a blog post on “What is SEO?”. This is because there is no relevant correlation between the two. If there are multiple instances of links with irrelevant anchor text the site will soon be disregarded as being irrelevant and will so be downgraded on the SERPs.
Best practices for anchor text
There are a number of best practices when it comes to inserting anchor text in your blogging platform. Here are a couple that you can apply:
- Be natural
Don’t break your train of thought in order to insert anchor text. Keep with the flow of your sentence and insert a link on appropriate anchor text. For example if you had a sentence such as the following – SEO is an important part of every digital marketing strategy – on your blog, and you also had a blog entitled “What is SEO?” on your site, “SEO”, in the first sentence, could be anchor text to this blog.
- Avoid over-optimising your blogs with anchor text
Google takes a very harsh stance towards keyword stuffing. In other words, overusing certain salient words that you’ve optimised your site for in order to try and rank highly for these terms. This is because this practice makes articles stilted and very difficult to read – not what the reader or Google wants to see.
Equally so, if you repeat the same anchor text in every sentence of your blog, with a link pointing to the same product page, Google won’t look kindly at this and won’t do you the favour of bumping your up the SERPs. Vary your anchor text. Don’t worry if you don’t have a link to another page in your paragraph. Rather have one or two high-quality, relevant links in your article as opposed to many irrelevant links.
- Don’t just link to your landing pages
When you develop internal links on your site, don’t just link your products and/or services pages to your blogs. Link your blogs to other relevant blogs. Google will be suspicious of a high-level link-building strategy because it won’t look natural to the search engine. This is because – according to it – people don’t just link to product and/or services pages. They link to pages that they see as relevant. This may indeed be a product page however, more likely, it will be something that they found interesting or useful on a blog. So don’t neglect your historical pages when you choose anchor texts for link building.
As you can see from the above, selecting the right anchor text for the correct links is an essential part of your digital marketing blogging strategy. This is because it will ultimately serve to create a network of content that is useful and relevant both to users and in the eyes of Google.
