Anchor text is used to show a link to another page, internal or external. We can carefully craft this text to reinforce relevancy. Lets take a quick look at the HTML code use to create a link…
<a title="Internal linking is important for any website" href="http://www.tint-network.co.uk/blog/seo/internal-linking-is-important-for-any-website/"> internal linking and relevance </a>
At the beginning, there is ‘<a’, an opening HTML tag and ‘a’ for anchor. Next comes ‘title’. When it comes to pages within your site, WordPress will fill this in for you with the title of the blog post you are linking to. After that comes ‘HREF’ which is for hypertext reference, the URL of page you are linking to.
Between that and the ‘</a>’ is the anchor text. These are the words that are used to indicate a link. The default is blue with an underline but they can be customised to be anything the site creator wants.
Now that the brief and possibly redundant lesson in HTML is over, lets look at how relevancy comes in to play.
Using the structured layout that I mentioned in my previous post about relevancy, we will have root or index page ‘a’ and first level page of ‘b’.
Page ‘b’ expands on a topic briefly mentioned on page ‘a’ and we want to link back. We could simply use the anchor text of ‘as I mentioned before‘ or ‘see my previous post‘. Not very descriptive or useful.
Lets go one better and use words that are relevant to page ‘a’ and page ‘b’. We will continue with the fishing theme used previously.
With relevancy in mind the anchor text used to link to page ‘b’ could be, ‘a more detailed look at fishing rods‘. Page ‘b’ might use, ‘back to the overview on fishing‘. Many might see just good SEO practice of using keywords. It’s more than that because…
- the URL in the HREF part should be a pretty permalink (uses the title of the post and therefore relevant words)
- the TITLE part will also contain the title of the blog post you are linking to
- the anchor text will contain relevant words
If blog post titles contain relevant words then you can’t help but enforce and demonstrate relevancy. It becomes even stronger when pages ‘c’ and ‘d’ also link in the same way.
The important things to remember are,
- Use words in blog post titles that are relevant to the theme of the blog post
- Anchor text words should be relevant to the common theme
- Ensure the TITLE part of the link is used
Demonstrating relevancy or good SEO practive, either way it can only do good for your sites standing in search engines results pages.
