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Tactics for using hyperlinks in your blog posts

Guest post by: Bonnie Harris

Article Overview: As our regular readers likely know by now, my strategies in blogging typically find a happy medium between having a technical-minded SEO focus and a customer-oriented approach. I’m all about balance and a big believer that regardless of what your SEO stats tell you, if you’re not connecting with your clients, you’re not accomplishing enough.

Tactics for using hyperlinks in your blog posts

As our regular readers likely know by now, my strategies in blogging typically find a happy medium between having a technical-minded SEO focus and a customer-oriented approach. I’m all about balance and a big believer that regardless of what your SEO stats tell you, if you’re not connecting with your clients, you’re not accomplishing enough. I bring this up only because there is one area where it’s just dawned on me that my views differ, and it relates to inserting hyperlinks on your blog.

Should Hyperlinks On Your Blog Be About Customers or SEO?

With the blogging ‘call to action’ posts still fresh on my mind, I went into a meeting to discuss our services with a new point of contact representing a long-term client. He had gone through and done a bit of an impromptu assessment of some of the blog content completed by the team. He made a couple of comments about our use of hyperlinks that got my wheels turning.

Both comments focused upon a sentence (yup, it’s a more traditional call to action) that looked something like this: “Contact us today to learn more about our professional tooth whitening services” (pretend the underlined text is a hyperlink to the homepage of the client’s site that’s hosting the blog).

His specific comments were:

1. “Shouldn’t you be linking to the client’s contact page rather than the homepage instead?”

2. “Why don’t you have the hyperlink over the ‘contact us’ for a stronger call to action?”

How a Balanced Linking Strategy Benefits SEO

Well, to these questions, I have answers and what it all comes down to is user-friendliness versus SEO, and it’s the side of the spectrum I fall on here that may surprise you. Yep, it’s true, when it comes to this topic; I no longer straddle the line with my dominant foot putting a little more weight upon the customer side. Would you like to know why? Let’s look at what my preferred strategy accomplishes by answering those questions above.

1. No. Why? Because for SEO purposes, there is a greater opportunity to increase the rankings of a site’s main page. Let’s be realistic, a website contact form probably doesn’t get a whole lot of ‘mentions’ by the world wide web. It’s not interesting, there’s nothing there, and people who want to contact a business that have landed anywhere on the site will find their way their regardless. Don’t believe me? Look at the rankings for ‘WriteSourcing’. My homepage is #1, you’ve got a couple of blog posts, and then the ‘About Us’ page falls further down the line. My website has 4 other pages that are nowhere to be seen. I don’t have a dedicated contact page, but if I did, it would clearly be fighting a losing battle. I’d rather focus on just getting people to my website.

2. This answer shares a lot of similarities with question #1. Regardless, here it is: because your website is going to have better rankings with certain search engine queries if the links are applied to relevant keywords. ‘Contact us’ is not going to be a queried, not on its own anyway. But, ‘professional tooth whitening services’ is a hot query that every dental website needs to dominate. Hyperlinking those keywords is a step in the right direction to making the website a force to be reckoned with when people type that into Google.

Why SEO Matters More

Now, I said I was leaning more towards SEO on this issue, but I didn’t say I was forgetting about the customers. I can see where the client is coming from in both cases, and he makes great points! But, we decided just one hyperlink was going to appear in each post, so I chose a more balanced strategy. This approach provides greater benefits to SEO and you’re still putting something out there for your customer. Sure, you could drop in a link to the ‘contact us’ page over the ‘contact us’ keywords. But the likelihood is that readers serious about dropping you a line will probably find it just as easily a few words away, so that greater convenience may not be worth the loss of the query-related benefits.

Had I dropped in a link to the direct tooth whitening services page, readers would save a couple of clicks when trying to learn more about the business. But, they’ll also get there themselves. You make that swap and you’ve got less effective SEO because guaranteed a tooth whitening page doesn’t hold the same rankings as the homepage (if it even makes a search engine appearance at all). This second strategy is one that can better evolve over time, as later once the homepage holds strong rankings, a secondary page focus may be required – but early on, this is a safe approach.

Where Will Your Hyperlinks Go?

While there is truly no right and wrong here, and everyone has a right to their personal preference (including my clients who will get the links they want where they want them – once I’ve done my job and consulted them on the pros and cons), my point is to illustrate that when you blog, every little seemingly inconsequential decision has a lot riding on it.

Please weigh in, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the approach you prefer for your blog and why.Let me know if there are any other ‘little’ blogging decisions you’d like to see me over-analyze just like this one, too.

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Article Tags: Blogging, blogging for small business, hyperlinking



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