On site optimization - anchor text in body text
-
Hi
I am learning SEO from scratch and am only a couple of weeks in. My wife has just started a website selling children clothes. In the left bar there are links to the different producers. Clicking it takes you to the products from that producer. In the body text om the main page ( epleskrinet.no) the same producers are mentioned. By time i need to opitmize for all of these. Is there any point in making them anchor text - taking them to the same URL as is given in the side bar ? Or will it get discounted ?
Dan Laerum
-
Hi Dan,
I would definitely recommend doing this. Forget SEO for second, it is great for users! If you are talking about a certain producer on the homepage and you have a full page deeper in your site about that producer then providing your users with a direct link to that makes perfect sense.
For sure, you should listen to some of the advise given above. Vary up your anchor text when linking to that page from different pages or sections of the site, but most importantly keep it natural and provide your users with the best experience possible.
I believe you can find a number of articles here on SEOmoz explaining tests run on how Google only counts the first anchor text it crawls to each specific URL. So if you homepage navigation is crawled first and features anchor text A, then the anchor you use further down you page does not really matter. Make it good for users. Here is an article by Rand from 2008 although I am sure there are newer ones: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
-
Hi Dan
I do not believe you will be penalised for using the same anchor text and linking to the page twice from the home page. I would suggest you use a slightly different anchor text (still with your primary keyword (the brand), but using different adjectives around that word) to increase the relevance, of the brand page you are linking too, for a combination of searches for that brand.
-
Hi Dan,
it's generally a good idea if you identify a (unique) primary keyword for each of your pages. Am I understanding you right, that you have a bunch of producer pages, which you want to have ranking for the name of the producer?
Then I'd say the primary keyword is the name of the producer and I would try to link to those pages with the primary keyword. This helps Google in understanding what the page is about. Slight variations of the keyword are appreciated. Also you could have some "click here" anchor texts (which is totally natural in your anchor text distribution).
Just avoid the following thing: assume you'd be selling cars and you link to /Porsche sometimes with the anchor "Porsche", but other times with "Ferrari". This throws Google overboard and it can't tell if it should rank this page for Porsche or Ferrari. If you'd link with "see more cars" Google will figure this is off-topic.
HTH,
schuon
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Homepage SEO optimization
Hello, I’m almost ready to lunch my new website https://thetravelhoop.com , I just need to create the content of the product page and put all the images. I would like to know what you think in terms of SEO of the home page (is the content that I want to rank the most). My doubt is that since it is a landing page, there is not a lot of text but mostly <h>. It’s not a styling decision of course (I know is bad practice) but mostly because they are supposed to be title/headings.</h> Do you think I’m doing something wrong, or do you have any suggestions? Thank you, Daniele
On-Page Optimization | | danielecelsa0 -
I have a site with jokes. What schema markup could I use?
My site is about jokes. I wonder what schema markup could I use to be more visible in the search results.
On-Page Optimization | | MichaelJanik0 -
How do I reduce the amount of internal links on my site?
Hi, Can someone help me with reducing the amount of internal links on our site please? https://www.thepresentfinder.co.uk Thanks Charlie
On-Page Optimization | | The-Present-Finder0 -
Linking to External Site In Nav Bar
Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Uinterview0 -
Rel canonical tag on a single page site?
I have a wordpress theme site which essentially is all in 1 page. Do I need to use rel-canonical tag? It would just loop?
On-Page Optimization | | graftene0 -
Text in collapsed section
Does anyone have any quantifiable evidence regarding text that is collapsed - when clicked the section expands and presents the text, against just having the text on view in the page. That is, instead of having a FAQ with question followed by answer, there is a question which you click to expose/expand the answer. Could the collapsed text be potentially detrimental to ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | MickEdwards0 -
How to make google not index quotes from other sites?
Hey guys, I have a site where we post quite a lot of info from other sites. We don't want google to de-index our pages because parts of it are quotes from other sites. What would you use to make it so Google sees it's a quote from another site? Or to just make Google not index the quote? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | StefanJDorresteijn0 -
Home Page is Not Ranking Anymore on this ecommerce site
Hi Everyone, I work regularly on this site www.cheapsnapframes.co.uk which is a cubecart based site and upto a few months ago the home page used to rank on poster frames we were on page 1 of google now we are on page 2 but it has dropped the home page and favours a category page. I have been looking at this to try and figure out why and I have today realised I had some external links on the home page pointing to the .com which the site used to run from but has been setup as a 301 redirect so I have changed these to internal links. I have used the on page tool and get an A but its been showing an A for a long time. Is there any other reason why we have lost out on this keyword term? Thank you in advance Tracy
On-Page Optimization | | dashesndots0