And How To Anchor Links Properly
The request for a video tutorial on how to add links to your blog posts came from several people, both in public and in private.
Once again, for many of you this may seem pedantic. But if people are asking, that means they don't know. And considering it's importance, it's best not to assume that people know. So, let's make this educational for more than just those who don't know how to link yet.
It's important to know more than the mechanics. It's important to know the right way to link as well.
If I want to give Nick M some link love, there are a couple of ways I can do it.
I can do this: Click Here to read Nick's Blog.
Or this: Read Nick's Blog.
But the best way to give him link love is like this: Nicolas M - REALTOR® in Palm Beach, South Florida.
Why? Because the link "anchor text" is very important.
And it has to do with relevancy and helping the search engines understand what a page is about. A link that is sent using relevant anchor text is more valuable to your search engine optimization than one that is not. "Click here" adds no value to Nick at all and in fact may even hurt. What you are saying to the search engines is that Nick's page is about "click here." If enough people did that to Nick, he might be on the first page of google when you search for Click Here, but that's probably not what he wants to be found for.
"Nicolas M - REALTOR® in Palm Beach, South Florida" is relevant to the content on his site. What we are saying, to both the person clicking the link and to the search engines reading the page is "this page is about Nick, a REALTOR® in Palm Beach." I'm willing to bet that's the search term Nick is going after - "Palm Beach Realtor."
We all get lazy. I do too. Sometimes I'm simply not paying attention and don't write good anchor text for my links, but it's always a mistake when I don't pay attention to how I'm linking.
Here's the video:
Note: I mention one of the more famous anchor text pranks, but I misquoted. It was actually on the term "miserable failure."
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