First of all, thank you all so much for your flexibility about BIP Week #9: Help Another Blog — I did not expect Mr. Linky to go down, which threw everything off. It was a learning experience for me and I appreciated your flexibility.
There is still at least one person who wants to participate but doesn’t have a partner, so if you’re still interested in helping another blog please email me at sophisticated.dorkiness[at]gmail.com before Wednesday, May 20 and I’ll connect some people up. Check out this post to find out what Help Another Blog is about.
So, on to Week #10: Linking with Anchor Text. Anchor text is a pretty easy thing to understand, and is important for blogs when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (how high up your blog appears when people use a search engine like Google to search for a particular phrase).
When you make a link, some of the text in your blog post will change to indicate it’s the link. Whatever words make up the link are the anchor text. In the second paragraph of this post “this post to find out what Help Another blog is about” is the anchor text of my link to BIP Week #9.
Here are a couple of articles that help explain the idea of anchor text in more detail:
- The Blog Herald: Sunday Morning SEO: What is Anchor Text and Why is It Important?
- WebProNews: Anchor Text Optimization
- Linking Best Practices via the Ning Book Blogs group (Thanks to Natasha from Maw Books for starting the topic)
Even if you don’t care about search engine optimization, creating good anchor text is just good blog practice. I would guess people are more likely to click on a link if they have some sense of what it’s about. Making link anchor text clear is a simple way to make your blog easier to navigate and more useful for your readers. With that in mind, here’s this week’s task:
- Read the two articles and one forum topic on anchor text and why you should pay attention to it.
- See if you can find out how to see what words and phrases people use in search engines that gets them to your blog. WordPress makes this easy, I’m not sure about Blogger. Can anyone help me out? Share your favorite keywords and searches here or on your blog.
- Focus on writing good anchor text for all your links. Instead of saying “You can read more here” and linking to “here,” describe your link in some detail and use that for anchor text. Try to make this a regular part of your blog practices.
This week is pretty simple, but anchor text is really a huge part of growing your blog. Getting good search engine rankings can bring more casual readers to your blog who can be turned into regular readers through your great content and other fun features. Anchor text is just a way to help get them there.
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Leave a comment or send an e-mail, I’ll get back ASAP. I’m back from being off the grid 🙂 Happy blogging!
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Great topic Kim (I may be a little biased – LOL!). Using Google Webmaster Tools is also a great tool. It tells me that the word “here” is #15 of my most used anchor text of incoming links from other blogs. Not good. I’m really trying to make an effort when I link out to other blogs, it’s a good habit to get into.
Using wordpress, what you call your post is what your link will be. Naming your posts in a correct manner is all you need to worry with there. Also there is a new plug in I don’t use because my site is coded with valid w3c code, and that is all you need for your SEO, called All in one SEO for wordpress.
@Natasha
Using a word to cover your link like ‘here’ is okay. The crawlers look at the actual link and when it comes up in a search box people see the whole link. I always use HTML to cover my URL, a long URL can also put people off.
another topic that can go hand in hand with this one is backlinking your own old posts within your new posts. if you’re mentioning a topic you’ve posted about before turn that mention into a link to the older post.
What you really need to do Kim is add Microformats tags to your blog. There is a Wordpress addon to do this, but Microformats are the way of the future for review blogs because they help Google to detect your review and rank it better in search engine results.
Anyway, they are my current experiment with blog improvement at least. 😉
Nathan
Fascinating! I did not know what anchor text meant until I clicked over to your wiki explanation (thank you) and I only add that I like to use the ‘click HERE’ because my 91 yo reader needs the visual clue and instruction. Thank you to Pam, too, for clarifying this more.
More goodies, as usual. I’m definitely interested in improving my SEO aspects, so this will get me off the tendency to use ‘click here’.
Thanks for this great post, i definitely need to improve my SEO skills
Hi,
THis site is very good a lot of wonder ful tips. i am trying to learn all I can I want to do blogging and backlinking. Thanks