The conclusion of yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget was that it's better to include links to within the body of specific landing pages instead of overloading your navigation with a long list of links. This is an especially good technique if you want to link to subsections like education pages or even individual page descriptions for your services.
When you include a hyperlink within the body of a paragraph, that link will have a natural relationship to the words around it - a contextual relationship.
Let's say you have a page dedicated to John Hardy jewelry on your website. From the body of one of your pages you might say, "We're now carrying the new line of John Hardy Bamboo Silver Hoop Earrings as well as the Bamboo Silver Slim Kick Cuff. Come in to see this fine jewelry and support the planting of bamboo seedlings."
That sentence above provides a lot of contextual information other than simply saying "hoop earrings." It's that contextual information that provides Google with a broader way to match search queries.
When someone searches for "silver hoop earrings" they find 3,930,000 results.
When someone searches for "john hardy silver hoop earrings" they find 49,500 results.
When someone searches for "John hardy silver hoop earrings bamboo" they find only 11,100 results.
The long tail keyword searches usually indicate a high degree of customer interest and potential purchase. These long searches also can't be matched to your website unless you have a long description somewhere on your site.
If you simply have "hoop earrings" as a link in the navigation on the left side you will only appear within the 3,930,000. But all those words surrounding "hoop earrings" in that long sentence help modify the earring phrase and bring the chance for specific sales, rather than just casual searches.
To conclude this example, if you only carried John Hardy Hoop Earrings then the link in your navigation should actually say "John Hardy Hoop Earrings" instead of simply "Hoop Earrings."
We hope this specific example helped you with some ideas for your own site. We'd like to know what you came up with, so send us some feedback.
