Internal site linking is important for several reasons, most of which deal with the navigational experience your users will have on your site. You want this experience to be as simple, easy, non-complex, logical, and intuitive as possible. Given this, you can significantly impact these goals by the anchor text you actually use in your links.
Internally, the anchor text should accurately describe the content on the page that it points to. If a link is going to another page on the site about interest only mortgages, then “see our page about interest only mortgages” is the correct textual treatment of the link.
The anchor text should also be used internally to reinforce the theme of the site and/or the theme of subsections of the site. For example, if you have a set of pages on the site dealing with interest only mortgages as well as a different section dealing with fixed rate mortgages, in the interest only sub- section, the anchor text should be varied to refer to all the topics dealing with that subsection. Interest-only is an Adjustable Rate Mortgage with a fixed payment schedule for a fixed period of time. So you may use terms such as “fixed payment ARM” or “Negative ARM.” These are terms that apply to interest-only mortgages that will assist users in finding your content and help theme the section.
Best practices for On-Site anchor text are
- Use anchor text that increases the internal navigational effectiveness of your site. The
text should make it plain what type of information the user can expect to see on the page that it points to.
- Use anchor text that contains the keywords and phrases of the pages they point to.
- Use anchor text that encapsulates the theme of the sub-section of pages it points to.
- Use related/synonymous terms in the anchor text links.
- Use descriptive anchor text to drive people deep your site. This should increase the
likelihood of people book marking your site, since you will have given them good useful information.
If such rewriting modules or plug-ins are not available, alternatively recode your scripts to look for variables embedded within the directory names or the file names instead of the "query string," however this tends to be quite a bit more complicated to implement. |
