Anyone who has graduated from law school knows how to skim large volumes of text quickly to find the most relevant parts to read carefully. Your eyes naturally gravitate toward underlined phrases. Google operates in a similar way when crawling web pages to determine your site’s ranking on a search engine results page. The difference is that, on a web page, the text might just look underlined to a human reader, and when the person clicks on it, it leads them to a linked page. This is called anchor text. Google, by contrast, can see through the links on sight. Which words you choose as anchor text affects your SEO rankings, as do the links connected to the anchor text. Updating the blog on your law firm’s website is always good, but strategic use of anchor text can truly elevate your legal blog content.
Common Types of Anchor Text
This sample call to action paragraph for a blog post on a law firm website contains phrases that can be used as anchor text. “Bloggins & Associates is a personal injury law firm in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Visit our website at www.blogginsinjurylaw.com to schedule a consultation with a car accident lawyer.” Anchor text falls into several categories:
· Branded – the name of a business or commercial product, such as “Bloggins & Associates”
· Exact match – the keyword you are trying to rank for, such as “car accident lawyer”
· Partial match – a paraphrase of the keyword you are trying to rank for, such as “personal injury law firm”
· Generic – a decontextualized invitation to click, such as “visit our website”
The Bloggins & Associates will not be harming its rankings by using any of these phrases as anchor text, as long as the links to them are appropriate; in this case, they should all lead to somewhere else on the Bloggins & Associates website, preferably the online contact form, since this is a call to action paragraph.
Get the Biggest SEO Boost With Contextualized Anchor Text
Especially in blog posts, the most effective kind of anchor text is contextualized anchor text. Imagine that Bloggins & Associates is publishing a post about distracted driving on its blog. They can make the post give the website an additional SEO boost through the use of anchor text. For example, the phrase “Delaware distracted driving laws” can link to the text of the statute or to a news article about the recently enacted distracted driving law. Likewise, the phrase “car accident lawyer” can lead to the car accidents practice area page on the Bloggins & Associates website. This will show Google that the blog post gets its information from credible sources and that more than one page on the Bloggins & Associates website contains information that will be useful to someone reading the distracted driving post.
Anchor Your Blog Posts at the Top of the Organic Search Results
The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will use anchor text strategically when writing original, authoritative blog posts for your law firm’s website.