Links are what? You should know this - the streets of the Internet. They help people and search engines get from one place to another. If you’ve learned anything from SEO link building strategies, you know that links make up a crucial part of SEO and search marketing. Heck, they even have a little to do with social media marketing. Often times, people miss the value of having links that go out to the other pages on your website. All of your pages should be part of the navigation structure, and it’s a good idea to have links in the content of your pages, too.
Search engines read link text, or anchor text, to get clues about what kind of subject material those pages might contain. Sometimes links are so powerful that they can fool the search engine into thinking that the linked page contains subject matter that closing relates to the link host, even though the page didn’t contain any relevant subject matter. A classic example of this brings us back to 2003 when George W. Bush was President of the United States. Many bloggers would place the anchor text “miserable failure” on their blogs and link to the former President’s biography. According to Wikipedia, his bio was ranked number one on Google for the term “miserable.” As you could imagine, his biography didn’t contain the keywords “miserable” or “failure,” the bloggers just tricked Google’s algorithms by supplying false anchor text.
When you’re creating pages, make sure to create links that go to other pages on your website. Also, make sure that other pages within your website link back to that linking page. It sounds confusing but it’s not - just make sure to link whenever possible. It’s important to use the right link text, or anchor text when linking to those pages. You should try to use keyword laced anchor text without overdoing it. Remember, the search engines and the people want to know where the road leads before clicking. That’s why you never want to use text like “click here” or “you’ll find more information here.”
Links in your pages serve several purposes:
- They help Googlebot and other search bots to find other pages on your site.
- Keywords in anchor text tell search bots and humans about where those roads lead.
- Keywords also tell search bots and humans about the page that contains links.