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Article: The One Annoyingly Stupid Reason Google Ignores Your Blog Links
Every once in a while an article comes along that changes the way you blog. For many of you, it may just be this article.
If you own a website, you’re going to want to know this important tip about creating links specifically designed for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.
One of your main goals as a blogger is to be received prominently in Google. If you are in denial about this or put more prominence in social media marketing, then you can exit from the article right here. Although, after a few days of denial followed by eventual acceptance of this reality, please come back and pick up where you left off.
There are bloggers who incredibly SERP’d well for common terms like “Make Money Online” that made an entire blogging career out of one, high-volume keyword.
Google is a miraculous, dynamic puzzle that once conquered can take your site to national notoriety. Twitter? Facebook? Sure, they’re all pieces of the marketing/promotion equation, but require enormous interactivity on your part to be successful… and may not always be the “viral solution” you’d expect.
Your Content and Links
As a blogger (or affiliate marketer), you carry a solemn duty to present content in a fashion to directly satisfy your customer’s need for a product, service, information – or the best scenario: to solve their problem.
It’s basic supply and demand
Your links are the gateway to customers, subscribers, and search engines blazing a path to your site.
Those that effectively draw traffic to their links make higher commissions and have more subscribers – just based on the sheer volume.
And it all comes back to your links. Let me explain.
Have you ever seen a link that looks like this? “Check out my herbal diet program here. “
Looks like a normal “lead-in” requesting action on the reader’s part, right? Well, not so fast… Do you see how the link is the word “here”? Well, that’s a BIG WASTE of a “link love” for you!
The mission of a search engine is to link information together in a meaningful way. Search engines familiarize themselves with your site content by targeting the links you have placed for their benefit. So, what does a search engine learn if the link is the word “here”?! Nothing!!
You are now trying to determine if you have placed poor links on your blog, aren’t you? You may have used links on other non-descriptive words like “home page” or “my site” or “this photo”.
Anchor Text
The words that appear in your link are called the “anchor text” and Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and all the lesser search engines look at the anchor text in all the links that point to a page in order to get the page’s meaning. So, if you’re linking to a page on your website, make your link from the keywords that someone would use to find pages like yours.
Confused? Let’s use our diet website again. For example, if you had a diet website, a better way to make that link would be like this: “Check out my herbal diet program.”When Google sees this link, it knows it’s going to find an “herbal diet program” on the other side.
This simple technique will help you rank higher on all of your websites. Go back and take a look at how you structure links – from your article marketing pages in Squidoo, HubPages, and Ezine Articles, to your Facebook Page, and ESPECIALLY the way you comment on other blogs.
9 Comments
Excellent posting by sourceblogger. Right on the dot with subjects S.E.O. and related.
Commented on your post on Facebook reagrading url submission software. Look forward to your inputs, thanks.
bit.ly/wokNtravel
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Hi Jeffrey, I thought this was a great article with a little extra info. in there that we might all think we know, but hey a reminder like this is very helpful. Certainly can’t hurt, and sometimes we forget some of those important things that we take for granted. I thought this blog was owned by Mike, did you buy this? It seems like a new owner can sometimes put a new spin on the same blog,nice job. Thanks jj
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Hi JJ,
How have you been?
Lately, I have been seeing a lot of examples of poorly structured links and felt moved to provide some direction.
I think we take for granted the I.Q. of many of our fellow bloggers. So, I hope it helped them.
I’m not sure of the Mike you speak of. This is the Ultimate Blogging Theme from Carl Ocab.
When I migrated to WordPress from Blogger, I changed the URL from source-blogger.com to sourceblogger.com.
So, it was like starting from scratch… again.
I’m glad you found me here.
Don’t be a stranger.
Jeffrey Baril – Source Blogger
Source Blogger recently posted..The One Annoyingly Stupid Reason Google Ignores Your Blog Links
This is an excellent and straight forward explanation of how and why to use keyword anchor text for your post links.
We all need to be reminded now and then of the importance of proper keyword use when it comes to our blog SEO.
Thanks Jeff!
Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella recently posted..Encourage Guest Blog Posts By Providing A Guest Posting Form
Wouldn’t linking the text “herbal diet program” be even better than “Check out my herbal diet program?”
Nice post about anchor text. I learned about this during my first year of blogging. Very important.
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I agree that anchor text does matter for ranking in the Google search results. But, it only matters if the link is dofollow as well. If that link is nofollow, then you may as well put in whatever you want as far as Google is concerned. In that case the link is only useful if the page title and content are relevant to the page content of the link’s destination. That is why some nofollow links can still matter.
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Hi Jeffrey.. yea I used to take anchor links for granted. Little things like these really do count. As long as you dont post anchor text links as comments otherwise, its spamming.
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Hi Jeffrey,
I recently added a page listing all the articles on my site.
Then I got to thinking, there’s really no reason I need to keep those exact titles as the anchor. Some Titles were more for fun than SEO, but I can easily change them to be very descriptive of their content for the robots.
Now I stumbled upon your post here
What I was pondering yesterday I shall put into action today!
Rick
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