I always knew that anchoring text links were important but not until I read a recent post by Jennifer Slegg, a Search Engine Optimization consultant, did I understand why it was so important. Jennifer’s post was directed at anchoring incoming links but as a blogger you should be doing this for most outgoing links as well. I have always tried to anchor all outgoing links with relevant keywords. I try to do this for all links not just the ones that are important to me.
If you don’t know what anchor text is here is a quick explanation. If I were to link to my Time To Budget the word “personal finance” or ” budget money” would be a more search engine friendly text to use. The anchor text used should be relevant to the website other wise it might have a negative affect instead of a positive one. An incoming link is one that is coming from somewhere else to your site. Outgoing links are the ones on your site going out. Just want to clear that up before I move on.
There are few opinions I have about anchoring text for outgoing links I would like to share with you. I believe it is important to treat your outgoing links as important as your incoming links. The reason for this is because the outgoing links (especially those that are high searched keywords) can bring your site traffic.
My personal finance blog is dedicated to helping people get out of debt and my favorite personal finance expert is Dave Ramsey. Since Dave Ramsey is a well know personal finance expert there are thousands of searches (39,000 in the month of Jan. using Yahoo search) performed monthly for the keyword phrase ‘Dave Ramsey’. I link to Dave Ramsey’s site and get several visitors a month that are following a search with that keyword phrase.
I also think it is important to use the title tag attribute (the text that pops up when you hover over the link) with outgoing links when ever possible. I am not sure including the title tag attribute will help SEO but it does offer the reader more information about the link. And it’s quite possible it might help if you use relevant keywords and keyword phrases.
Google Algorithms are meant to find good content and reward those sites with good content. I am of the firm belief that websites/blogs that focus on content and offer links that are relevant to the content of the article will be rewarded. There are some tips that will definitely help increase page rank but I think it is important to stay ‘content focused’ instead of PR or traffic focused. If you get confused about all the different PR techniques take a step back and think about what it is a natural search engine would want. Wouldn’t the answer be, content that will help those that are searching for it? Focusing on content also means sharing knowledge and being a valuable contributor to the World Wide Web.
You can add the TITLE attribute to your image tags too. This gives the search bots a teensy bit more to chew on and can also serve as a caption for the picture as the reader hovers the cursor over it.
Like you, I’m doubtful that this boosts your overall SEO much, but I apply the TITLE attribute more for the sake of added info for my readers and well, maybe ‘cuz I’m just a little OCD…
Rob O. makes a good point.
And people should know there’s a difference between a title attribute for a text link (which I agree, probably does not help SEO very much at all) and your title tags, which are in the source code of your page. The words are displayed in the top bar of your internet browser.
Those title tags are VERY important in SEO. Even the title tags on the pages of your inbound links are important. It’s something to keep in mind while link building.
Wordpress users should install the plugin SEO Title Tag. Then you don’t have to fiddle with the CSS – you can set the title tags for each page.
Thanks Nathania for cluing me in on the proper term to use. I was not sure what it was called so I just used ‘tag’. I also use the Wordpress plugin SEO title tag on this blog and am very pleased with it.
Rob O. thanks for the input!