With our continuing coverage of blogs and blogging techniques, today we'd like to give you some ideas of how to link your blog entries from one to another, to your website, or to products in your online catalog.
A few days ago we explained that "anchor text" is the term use to describe the actual words you are linking. The example we used in a previous Daily Golden Nugget was the sentence:
"We'd like to show you our best [engagement rings]."
As we said previously, the words "engagement rings" are shown as the anchor text and that would link to another page.
If you put that sentence in a blog post, you could link it to a dedicated to engagement rings landing page with details about various engagement rings, or you could link it to a product catalog page showing 10 or so different engagement ring styles.
Google will relate the phrase "engagement rings" not with the blog post, but with the page you are linking to. Every link to the engagement ring page will improve the popularity of that page, but we have some guidelines.
Guideline #1. Only link 1 time from any blog page to a target destination page.
If your page URL is /engagement-rings.html then you should only link 1 time from the blog to that URL. There's a bit of controversy in the SEO community if multiples links from the same page will help or hurt you. We say just do it once per blog entry.
Guideline #2. If you must link more than once from a blog entry to a target destination page then use a different anchor text phrase.
Yes, we are contradicting our Guideline #1, but there are times when it makes sense to give the reader a duplicate link to another page, just don't use the same anchor text.
In the above example you could link to /engagement-rings.html using the anchor text "engagement ring" and then later you would link using the anchor text "solitaire ring." Google claims they will drop redundant anchor text links when found multiple times on a page.
Guideline #3. When linking to the same target destination page from multiple blog entries you should use a variety of anchor text phrases.
Here's a good illustration:
Blog Post A -> links to /engagement-rings.html using the anchor text "engagement rings"
Blog Post B -> links to /engagement-rings.html using the anchor text "solitaire rings"
Blog Post C -> links to /engagement-rings.html using the anchor text "wedding rings"
From Google's perspective they have found 3 different phrases to the same page, and to them this looks natural.
On the other hand, this looks unnatural to them:
Blog Post A -> links to /engagement-rings.html using the anchor text "engagement rings"
Blog Post B -> links to /engagement-rings.html using the anchor text "engagement rings"
Blog Post C -> links to /engagement-rings.html using the anchor text "engagement rings"
Google sees these 3 pages with the same link and same anchor text and automatically assumes some type of link building scheme.
The bottom line of today's Daly Golden Nugget is to use you various blog posts to link to various other destinations inside your site using various anchor text when doing so. This all looks natural to Google and increases ranking.
