Forum Moderators: open
You've got your TITLE, META description, ALT tags. You've also got your Blue Widgets in an H1 headline and blue widgets appears 2 or 3 times within the page text.
But you want to hyperlink one of those "blue widgets" within the text. In this case, you can't link it to another page because this is the page about blue widgets. So you have to link it to itself.
What's the best way to do this (not involving hidden links) ?
One idea is to use page jumps but that relies on having a long page. Are there any other ways of doing it that don't look too odd to users ?
Having a link back to the page that you are already on really doesn't make much sense. Especially if you only do it for the sake of getting a keyword rich anchor tag in there.
I personally don't believe that keywords in the anchor tag carry that much more weight than any other instance of the keyword that you can easily work into a page.
Why not simply add another instance of the phrase to the body copy or headline text?
If you absoletely must have a link on that page to make yourself happy, link it to an article on Blue Widgets, or to another site with information on Blue Widgets...or even to a picture of widgets. Linking it back to the page you are already on will simply annoy your visitors. :)
I think external linking is a last resort, and I'd sooner use the page jump trick or just link back to some other page within the site.
But I'm interested that you think anchored text is no more effective than standard text. Does anyone else believe this ? I'd like to (would make SEO much easier) but is there any evidence ?
G.
From a usability point of view, I totally agree. But we're talking SEO here
A word of caution that all the traffic in the world doesn't mean squat if the site isn't usable and friendly. Remember, traffic doesn't equate sales. Traffic of qualified individuals that can then be converted by an experience on the site mean sales.
Thus, SEO is not the be-all-end-all reason to design sites in a certain way.
If you don't want to add it to the body text, how about adding an extra heading tag with the phrase rather than adding a link to use the phrase. I do believe that text within the heading tag is given more weight than text within an anchor tag. (Unless perhaps, that anchor tag is on a third-party site leading TO your site, in which case I think the text of that tag is important.)
