High search engine rankings are important to most bloggers and website owners. To achieve those page one search placements, a combination of interesting and informative content along with many links to your blog are needed.
Let’s talk about links today. To be more specific, let’s discuss the often overlooked links to your blog or website’s internal pages, located in the blog archives. When most bloggers and website owners think of links, they naturally consider links to their home page first. After all, the blog or website home page is the most obvious and visible page to be on the receiving end of an inbound link. Too often, the very important links to internal pages are forgotten, and get lost in the shuffle. Their latent SEO power is let go to waste. A bit of link planning can turn that lost SEO strength into higher search engine rankings.
Blogs in particular receive an abundance of incoming links to internal blog pages. Think of every time that someone linked directly to one of your blog posts. As that page moves into the blog archives, that internal inbound link remains alive, and providing link popularity to power to that page in particular; as well as the entire blog in general. Incoming link power is spread through the entire blog, as the pages are interlinked, helping all of the pages rank well, to some degree.
It’s thought that the search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search place varying, but high degrees of importance on internal site links. It seems logical that search engines would credit internal posts and articles, as links to internal pages are a strong indicator of valuable and important site or blog content. As a result, they help boost the blog or site’s search engine rankings. Both the linked page and the overall site or blog benefit.
Not only is the link important, but so is what is referred to as link anchor text. While the jargon term is interesting, link anchor text is simply the wording that appears on the clickable link line. Those words that are set to be clicked will often contain keywords relevant to the content of the receiving page.
Bloggers often use very powerful link anchor text, often without concern for the resulting SEO benefits, to describe the receiving post. Bloggers are usually more concerned with sharing information and interesting blog posts, and less with search engine rrankings. With that keyword rich link anchor text in place, the inbound link packs much more search engine punch.
When linking to your own archived blog posts, be sure to use descriptive wording, relevant to the post receiving the link. Words like “read more” or “click here” should be studiously avoided, and not be used as link anchor text. Of course, you may want to rank for those phrases for reasons unknown and entirely bewildering. In that case, use “click here” if you so desire.
Links from other blogs or traditional websites, to your internal site pages, can work wonders in your search engine placements. With the addition of keyword rich link anchor text, that linked page can turn your blog or site into an SEO dream.
Isn’t that resulting top spot in Google something to get excited about!
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Wayne Hurlbert provides insigtful information about marketing, promotions, search engine optimization and public relations for websites and business blogs on the popular Blog Business World.
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