Do You Optimize All Links For SEO?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Good search engine optimization practices suggest that links, particularly internal links, should have appropriate anchor text; that is, anchor text that uses keywords or keyword phrases.

Most website owners who are skilled in search engine optimization techniques know this already. However, sometimes the concentration is on deep content pages and the obvious links are left un-optimized.

Examples that you may see frequently include the ‘About’ page, Sitemap and Contact pages. These URL’s can often be optimized as well, particularly if you want to increase the number of keywords on a page.

The optimization of these pages can be straightforward. For example, you could link your ‘About’ page using the anchor text of ‘About site name‘, the sitemap’s anchor could be ‘sitename’s Sitemap‘.

One link that is rarely optimized with keywords is the email or ‘Mailto’ url. This link normally looks like:

(a href=”mailto:yourname@yourwebsite.com”) Email Me (/a)
(note: replace the brackets with the greater than > and less than < signs)

The text ‘Email’ could be changed to include a keyword or site name as well.

There are many internal links that could benefit your pages by simply applying a few basic techniques. Sometimes, the obvious is overlooked.