4 replies to this topic

[Blueray]

Hi,

I have a question that has sort of been brought up here many times, but all i could find is people asking it specifically about PR and I'd like an approach from a more 'general SEO point of view'...

Say I have a site about bowling and i want my home page to rank well for this word. I know that I should use "bowling" as an anchor text of internal links on pages throughout my site (linking to the home page). Now the question is, do I do that with EVERY occurrence of "Bowling" or just with the first one on each page? Will 5 links from page A to homepage be better than just one? Or maybe i Should do more than one, but not too many? like 2,3?

Also, same question in regards to links from other sites. If I write an article about bowling on another site, and i could use HTML freely, should I just use the first occurrence of 'bowling' to link to my site, some, or all of them?

Thanks

[Randy]

Think about it from the users perspective Blueray.

Would you want to be reading someone elses site and see 5 or 10 or 50 links in a page, and every time you click on one of them you get whisked off to a home page that you've already seen? Would that get frustrating? Would you leave after it happened a time or two, even if otherwise the site seemed to provide exactly what you were looking for?

You betcha !

There is some thought out there that the engines basically ignore multiple links to the same page from a single page. There's no way to prove or disprove this concept, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. If you put on your Real User hat and answer pretty much any question from that perspective you'll always be right.

[Jill]

You'd want to not use just one-word as your anchor text, but research which phrases were most appropriate. (I know you were just using bowling as an example, but wanted to make it clear that it would be a waste of time to attempt to rank highly for a general word.)

[Blueray]

Thanks for replying!

It shouldn't be a problem though linking several times from the same page to DIFFERENT pages using anchor text keywords that ARE relevant to the target pages, right?

[Randy]

Nope, no problem at all. If it makes sense for users, it's a good thing to do.