Part of any link building campaign should always include the internal Link Architecture that you have within your domain and off the domain for link building activities. I tend to use the term Link Architecture because it is similar to the Information Architecture (I.A.) that is used within your site. The Link Architecture will give you a naming convention for text links and image alt text used for links on your domain or for any other link building.
To preface, I would say that it is important to have some sort of I.A. for your site prior to building out your pages. This can be done quickly by writing the information down on notecard(s). That being said, I would always recommend to create a formal I.A. and Link Architecture documentation. The benefit of creating formalized documentation is that you can pass it around within your organization to creative and development teams or an agency that could quite possibly be working with your organization.
Documenting your Link Architecture and link text and/or image ALT text will provide a frame of reference.
When a search engine crawls a web page it associates the link text to the page it is linking to, which then associates link value to your page. An example of this is using the link text “web design” that points to “web-design-services.php.” Doing so will tell a search engine that the page you are going to is specifically about “Web Design.” These are the types of associations that should be created, documented and implemented for any and all link building in order to get the most link value possible for the associated keywords or key terms.
The naming convention used also applies to the image ALT text that are linked as well. All images that are linked should contain the contextual text within the ALT tag. For example, if you have an image that has a link pointing to a developer referral program page, the image ALT text should be example that, “Developer Referral Program.”
Something to look out for is using the terms “click here” and “this” for link text, which is a bad naming convention. Using this type of link text will not provide any context to the user and also to search engines, and along with that, it does not offer any link value to your domain.
The crucial thing to remember is that associating keywords to the link text when performing any link building or submitting to directories will pass the link popularity and PageRank value to the keyword you have associated to a web page. This in turn, makes your pages more relevant to search engines and will most definitely increase your rankings.
Related Article(s):
Sculpting PageRank using rel=”nofollow” for your internal Link Architecture
Had to sphinn this for the idea of sharing this throughout the business, and formalizing it.
I want to point out that click here/this are probably stop words in most engines. Therefore, the page associated probably isn’t getting anchor value from that. So if you use ‘this page on analytics’ the counted anchor text would probably be on analytics. Plus it looks more natural ;).
Gab, I am glad you agree on the idea of sharing through the org. Also, totally agree on your second point, but, I just hate seeing things like “click here”, no link value and totally not semantic…
Sometimes it can make sense to use a linktext like “click here”. But never in your navigation (which is the basis of your internal link structure)!
Really agree with you Tony, the point of using “click here” anchor text can be tempting for seo who want to looks more natural. But in the long run, that doesn’t offer any context to the end user for who we build websites in the first place…
Also try to not use alt and title tags filled with terms like “Homepage” or “Back to”. Always try to have them filled with useful content.
It is a good idea to make your home page SEO friendly with links and appropriate keywords pointing to the specified page. Choosing the right word, instead of a "click here" is important for SEO purposes.