Internal Links ... What's the Context?

Every SEO site has a number of concepts that need to be incorporated to ensure that is runs as successfully as possible. Context links in particular play a pivotal role. Context comes about on the basis of something or circumstances that particularly form a setting of an event, possibly a statement or even an idea, in which it can be fully understood. Links are a relationship between two things or situations that tend to affect one another. Now together, these terms create one unison imagery that should always be a key focus for any SEO strategy.

Based on The Context of Internal Links • Yoast:

Context Links, something often overlooked or minimized, is so very actionable believe it or not. With that being said, Great internal linking structure comes very easily if you have the right tools. But why exactly am I even mentioning this?

Now, the importance of internal linking structure comes from the necessity of backlinks within any site platform. . As an example we can look at the article by Marieke van de Rakt, the cofounder of Yoast, where she makes note of how Google works comes from patents. Whenever companies like Google, Android, or even Apple, come up with a new kind of technology they often claim a patent. By studying these approaches they give us plenty of insight to what the organization is up to. Back to the concept of Context, these ideologies give us context on how we make sense of the world around us, the context of any person, place, or thing, allows us to conceptualize more thoughts on whatever the situation.

Going back to our website in particular, the context of links is important predominantly due to the fact that companies or organizations can determine whether certain links are useful to the reader based on what is embedded within these links. For instance on our infographics page I embedded a link in the actual picture as well as at the bottom of the page (click here to view) that brings you to a website to not only see my infographic in action but also to aid in helping our viewer create their own.

The relevancy of the link and the text combined with it deems the post helpful to the user in my opinion. Links that make sense help the rankings of the post, so having links that further the growth and understanding of the reader by adding more substance to what they are already consuming makes it more valuable. Another example could be the embedded links within the infographic itself (look at the image below for more context), the buttons say “read more” or “click here for” which make them more conceptualized and relatable to the topic at hand.

Click here to see original post.

But why exactly do these things matter? Well, internal linking could be considered imperative for two reasons according to Marieke van de Rakt,

1. It is essential to get the site indexed

2. You need internal links to get your site ranked

Links embedded in a meaningful context like the two I mentioned above will get more a positive ranking then random cites at the footer of each blog post. By making things as easy and efficient for the reader as possible makes them more likely to consume your content and share it with friends.

In the final analysis, linking related content can seem time consuming, not worth it, or even just unnecessary, but by gathering research on this topic I can confidently say that internal linking will definitely help with coherency and success. Internal linking tools help not only synthesize the text but create a better experience for your consumers.

Based on the findings in Anchor Text Guide for 2019:

With that being said, every site or context link needs an anchor text which is visible and clickable. For instance https://mornan.wixsite.com/webprojecttwo, is ours! But why does this matter, well, backlinks provide relevancy to what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve. By looking at the words within our HTML you can understand the concept of the website being “web project two”. This matters for a number of reasons, first being when you Google any context on our site it be linked to this internal backlink through an anchor text and penalize any spam or over-optimization.

Now given these points there are different types of anchor types we need to consider. As mentioned by Nathan Gotch in Anchor Text Guide there are ten types;

1. Branded

2. Generic

3. Naked Link Anchors

4. No Anchor Trick

5. Image Anchors

6. Brand and Anchor Keyword

7. LSI Anchors

8. Partial-Match Anchors

9. Exact Match Anchors

10. Co-Occurrence — Build Relevancy Without Exact Match Anchors

But, our website only relates to some of these categories. For instance our website anchor text can be disclosed as generic in which we have links like “go here” which are specific to whatever you are looking for. For instance as mentioned before with the infographics or in the information architecture blog post, or even with this post in our bibliography. The generic anchor text blows for the profile to look natural and are necessary. It is not necessarily always “click here” or “read this for more information” but it relates to the context being proposed. Another category our site sufficiently relates to is naked link anchors in which target key words, like “for more information click here” or “read more” or having videos attached in blog like here or our infographics in blog like here, these anchor texts make super relevant content natural are are the bulk of backlinks like Nathan Gotch said at a whopping 20%.

As to be noted our site relates to LSI Anchors (Latent Semantic Indexing) where variations of main keywords like project, structure, research and results, allow you to search key words and have them come up accordingly.

One last category our site pertains to is the co-occurence, through Wix we managed to build relevancy without exact match anchors but surrounding our link with relevant content to increase its popularity and power. By putting a link within the infographic, through videos, or even this site alone it makes it relevant for what was being talked about.

Here is a snippet from the creation aspects of this website in particular:

Going back to the drawing board of this website, we started with a fresh link profile, with no backlinks but yet and created a relevant link with an exact match anchor, that being “Web Project Two”. This was smart for this assignment in which we created an optimized platform that shows established a target page right away. People who wanted to learn about us, this assignment, our findings, and the site construction would be attracted to this. It’s about quality over quantity, our approach to link acquisition made our site more usable for the user. There is no pattern, because we limited out backlinks and have less keyword-rich anchor texts the site is relevant and has high quality links.

Now where exactly do we place all of our anchor texts? Our website provides a niche. For relevant guest posts in which we allow guests posts and have a backlink to the author in a bio box as well as comment section.

This is optimized so that our site allows its users to link within the body of the content but below the post. More importantly we provide resource pages that allow us to title the resource for instance if this article was places on a SEO resources page I would use a title like Official Anchor Text Guide with Proven and Tested Strategies for University Students as the anchor text and consider this a partial match anchor.

Now, what we also have done is by creating links within key words we have increased the overall density. Rather than repeatedly using the same words throughout our posts we have included things like go back to the section “_____________________” to understand these concepts better. It makes it less repetitive and also more interactive. It aids in helping remove links with commercial anchor texts making our website less spam-related, over the course of the assignment we continuously went back and deleted links, added links, and made sure that everything looked and worked to the best of our abilities. By diluting the anchor texts from certain blog posts we were able to create foundational links that combined low-quality link profiles with keyword-rich anchor text to create a united platform.

As an example, we can take a look at Gotch’s Anchor Text Diluting steps and how they apply to our website.

1. Strong Relevant Backlinks

2. Business Directories/Local Citations

3. Legit Social Profiles

4. High Quality Press Release Distribution

The concepts that relate to our site in particular are not necessarily all valid considering it is not professional and there was no financial aspects involved but we do have the concepts in place to create these if we needed to through Wix’s platform, it is extremely easy to add things like social profiles on facebook, twitter, facebook, google, for instance some images when you hover over them they offer you the option to save them on pinterest. To me, the articles make it seem very easy to create high-quality press release distribution its just about the time and effort essentially. With that being understood, by doing so we were able to avoid a plethora of penalties and create a cost-effective (or free in our case) site that makes it easier to function for this project.

Conclusion:

With that being said, in the final analysis by tracking the process and progress of these internal links it became evident they are critical in creating a fully functional and high quality site. All things considered, now that you understand the basis of context links we hope that the strategies used our website itself as well as the tips we provided will help achieve a successful ranking and site of your own!

By: Aajah Card-Mornan

Bibliography:

Van de Rak, M. (2019). The context of internal links • Yoast. Retrieved from https://yoast.com/the-context-of-internal-links/

Gotch, N. (2019). Anchor Text Guide for 2019. Retrieved from https://www.gotchseo.com/anchor-text/