Mac SEO Blog

The way you link internally on your site can be a very important way for you to tell search engines about the content on each of your pages. To learn more about internal links, watch the video below.

Video Transcript:

The links tab will show you how your linking structure is set up on your site. You will be able to see the outgoing and incoming links for each page on your site. Just so there is no confusion, the incoming links in this section of SEIntelligence are for internal incoming links.

In each links section, you will see three headings; Anchor Text, URL, and Title.

The one heading I want to focus on is Anchor Text. What is anchor text? Anchor text is the text used to link to a certain page. Typically, it is the text you see that is blue and underlined.

So why do we care about anchor text? To help me explain, let’s take a look at an example. If I perform a Google search for the term ‘click here’, you will notice that the first result is for Adobe Reader. Why would Adobe Reader appear number one for the search term ‘click here.’ It has nothing to do with that term. The reason for this is because so many sites on the web link to this exact URL, and the anchor text they use is ‘click here.’

Because all of these sites are linking to the Adobe Reader page using ‘click here’, search engine algorithms now classify that page with that key-term.

So what does this information mean to you? Well, take a look at the anchor text you use to link to other pages on your site. Read the recommendations in SEIntelligence and see what you can do to improve your anchor text. If page A on your site is targeting West Palm each real estate, then make sure that whenever you link to page A, you use West Palm Beach real estate as the anchor text.

You can change your anchor text right here in SEIntelligence. So as an example, this page that I’m on right now is targeting these two phrases. If I look in the incoming links section, I will see all of the pages that are linking to this page. If I click on each of these arrows, it will bring me to each of those pages. I will then find the link in the Outgoing links section, and change the anchor text. So I will change this anchor from Listings to West Palm Beach Real Estate, or West Palm Beach Real Estate Agent.

I’m also going to change the Title for this link. The title attribute is usually used to give a bit of extra information about an element. The title attribute is not really a place to repeat your anchor text. You’ll notice that when you hover your mouse over a link that has been given a title attribute, the text will appear.

So in this case, instead of writing west palm beach real estate, which is what I have as the anchor text, I might type something different, but along the same lines. As an example, I will write John Smith’s real estate listings in West Palm Beach, Florida. If you can’t really provide any more information beyond your anchor text, don’t worry about putting anything in the title attribute. Theres is still some debate about whether the title attribute has significant value in terms of SEO, so I encourage everyone to do further research on this topic.