How do you link to yourself? Anchor Text for Internal Links Matters

One of the most basic principles of search engine optimization is that the words that other sites use within the text of their links to you (called the anchor text) have an impact upon how your site ranks for those words.

For example - if you want to rank well in Google for the words ‘pink widget’ then it’d be more helpful for another site to link to you with the words pink widget than any other words.

The principle extends to internal links on your blog. When you link to yourself (for example linking to a previous link that you’ve written) you should consider doing so with descriptive words of the post rather than generic words.

For example - if I wanted to link to my previous post titled ‘blogging for beginners’ in a post rather than linking like this:

‘you can read my post on blogging for beginners here‘

it would be more powerful in terms of the search engine ranking of the post to link to it as:

‘you can read my previous post on the topic, blogging for beginners‘

It doesn’t sound like much - but it’s these small adjustments in the way that a blogger blogs that can add up to having a bit impact upon the ranking of that blog in search engines.

One more thing - it’s not just the links from within your posts that this matters for. Internal links from your navigation and menus matter too. For example if you link to your categories - think about the words you use there too.