Don't Just Click Here: Linking to Important Keywords

Joel Gales Sullivan
Keyword linking is a good way to get the most out of your internal and external links. As you know, linking to optimize SEO is an important strategy in gaining higher rankings, but it's not just what you link to, but how you link.

Imagine this scenario: you've just written an article on the hot new restaurant in town, Blue Moon Cafe, and you created a child page under the article with a sample menu from the restaurant. You point your reader's attention to this menu with the following sentence: To see a sample menu from Blue Moon, click here, with the word "here" linked to the child page.

While it's good that you established the internal link and added value to the experience of your reader by providing the sample menu, linking to keywords instead of the word "here," would have increased the meaning of the link to search engines.

When you set up a link to the words 'Blue Moon sample menu,' the robot crawling your site sees <a href="http://www.bluemooncafe.com/sample_menu/"> Blue Moon Cafe sample menu</a>. A keyword-rich link is not only a good way to show search engines the meaning of the link (especially if the URL is not as descriptive as the one above), but it is also appealing to the eye of your reader. Linked words are usually a different color than the surrounding text, so your keywords will jump out to anyone scanning the page. Rather than seeing non-descriptive words like "here" or "click" popping out all over the page, they will see keywords related to the article, like "Blue Moon Cafe sample menu."

So a quick rewriting of the sentence "To see a sample menu from Blue Moon Cafe, click here" (with 'here' linked) could be "For a taste of what this new cafe has to offer, take a look at the Blue Moon sample menu" with "Blue Moon sample menu" linked to the child page. Hopefully you will have named this child page Blue Moon Sample Menu, given it a good metadescription and linked back to the full article with a sentence like the following: Return to the full review of the Blue Moon Cafe, with the words "review of the Blue Moon Cafe" linked.

Joel Gales Sullivan is Content Manager at Godengo and an avid student of search engine optimization, especially in regard to its use with Rivista. If you have questions or comments regarding optimizing your site, please contact her at joel(at)godengo(dot)com.

Posted by Super on April 16, 2008 at 05:58 PM in Search Engine Optimization | Permalink

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