Top 5 Ways to Optimize Your Internal Anchor Text

These days link building is one ‘hot topic,’ we’re all obsessed with getting more links, and hopefully, most of you will be going after links obsessively the right way.

Ye,p it’s fair to say that we love to rant about how to build more backlinks to our web properties, after all, it is one of the most ‘essential building blocks’ for getting more traffic and improving search engine rankings, right?

But as well as looking at offsite link building and SEO, we cannot lose focus on the importance of onsite link building, (interlinking posts and pages in your blog or website).

So today’s post is an appropriate one, as I want to share with you 5 smart ways to optimize your internal anchor text links that will help you greatly lower your bounce rate, improve user experience on your site and equally share valuable search engine link juice amongst the awesome pages of your site, and overall improve your on page SEO.

How to Optimize your Internal Anchor Tex Links?

1. Combine short and long tail keywords

OK, so my first tip is to use a combination of both ‘single keywords and ‘long tail phrases’ to link out to other content on your website. Here are a couple of examples of single and long-tail keywords –

Example A) Create a WordPress blog in Bluehost in under 10 minutes! (Uses single hyper-linked keyword).

Example B) Check out my awesome email list-building workbook, and increase your opt-in conversion rate now! (Uses long tail phrase).

2. Variate your anchor text links and make them flow naturally

When interlinking with other content on your website, ensure that it appears and flows naturally. This is both important for your users and for the search engines. Avoid using too many exact-match keyword anchor text, always add variety to your anchor text. There is an amazing post by SEOmoz about exact match anchor text worth reading here. OK below I’m giving some examples of making anchor text appear natural –

Example A) If you want to learn how to promote your YouTube channel effectively, we have over 50 tips and suggestions for you, click here to find out more. (This example shows a NON-optimized anchor text link with no keyword relevance. Although it might seem to appear natural, ‘Click here’ happens to be just a generic phrase. It would have been better if I had anchor linked ‘promote your YouTube channel’).

3. Link to ‘relevant content

You might laugh but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve visited a website and clicked on a link that’s taken me to a page that was totally unrelated and irrelevant. Linking to ‘relevant content’ is so important, especially if you want to improve and maintain a good user experience for your visitors and better your search rankings.

4. Use keyword link descriptions

Link descriptions are those ‘hover texts’ you see appear when you run your mouse pointer over a link as if you needed to be reminded. It’s good practice to ensure that you always add a description with keyword when interlinking, because as well as the SEO benefits it also helps your visitors know exactly what a particular link is about, and where it will take them when they click on it, again thinking about your user experience.

5. Don’t go crazy and link to everything

My final tip is whilst it’s good to have a healthy balance of well optimized anchor text links, both for your site users and for getting better search engine rankings, don’t go crazy and link to absolutely everything, A) it looks spammy and B) it will absolutely look unnatural.

So let’s round up this week’s tips –

• Combine short and long tail keywords
• Variate your anchor text and avoid exact match keywords
• Link to relevant content
• Use link descriptions with keyword
• Don’t go mad and link to everything, keep it clean

So there you have it folks, my top 5 tips for improving and optimizing your internal links, of course for all the right reasons.

Over to your audience…

OK, it’s your turn to add your say. Do you have any tips, ideas, and suggestions you’d like to add? If so I’d love to hear them, so get conversing in the comment section below as always troops Enjoy the rest of your week.