SEO Tips for Affiliate Bloggers: Link Titles

When you link to a page, Google will follow that link, index the keywords on it, and determine what keywords that page is relevant for. But it will also index the anchor text used in the link. This is why links that are descriptive are better then just using “click here.”

This is why when I blogged about the importance of internal linking last week, I touched upon the trade-off between linking to an affiliate page and linking to a previous post that itself links to an affiliate page. You can read what I had to say about it there, but the point was that every time you feature a keyword in your post, you have an opportunity to turn that keyword into anchor text for a link back to a relevant affiliate page or blog post.

Well, anchor text isn’t the only part of a link that Google indexes when trying to determine what keywords the landing page is relevant to. There are other bits of meta information you can also include in a link that can help you help a landing page rank for keywords. One of these is the link title.

Link Titles
The purpose of a link title was initially describe the destination of a link when the anchor text did not. This would help both users and search engine spiders predict where a link led before following it.

For example, if I use the anchor text “click here” or “yesterday I wrote” to link to an article called All About Apples, then I could insert a title tag that read “all about apples.” Title tags are simply inserted in the link’s HTML code in the following way:

<a title=”All About Apples” href=”http://www.example.com/all_about_apples.html”>Click Here</a>

The SEO opportunity, here, lies in keyword variation. You see, keywords often have many substitutes for which you also want to rank for. Title tags can help you do this.

For example, if I have a page or post on my blog about cheap iPhones, and there are affiliate links on that page/post sending users to where they can buy discount iPhones, then I’m going to want that page to rank for both “cheap iPhones” and “discount iPhones.” Consequently, I’m going to use one keyword in my anchor text and the other as a title tag, so the link might look like this:

<a title=”discount iPhones“ href=”http://www.example.com/cheap_iPhones”>cheap iPhones</a>

A huge part of SEO is covering all your bases. As I said last week:

Internal linking is like building a your net or web out of your blog. The more links you have tying your content together, the stronger your web is: with each post it grows larger, and with each link it gets stronger. Build it large enough, and you catch a lot of traffic. Build it strong enough, and you’ll be able to refer that traffic down just the right sales funnel, and make a commission in the process.

But the web keeps growing and there are more and more users everyday. So if you’re going to succeed as an affiliate blogger, you have to remember 2 of the 10 SEO Myths.

The #6 myth is that SEO is a one-time event. It is not. You keep blogging, the web keeps growing, so you have makes sure that you keep leveraging the full value of every link.

Similarly, the #7 myth is that SEO takes years to show results. It doesn’t. I’ve personally seen results inside seven days. But the flipside of that brings us back to #6: because results can be generated quickly, they can be lost quickly, as well. You have to maintain your SEO efforts with every page, post, and link you publish.

Written by CT Moore from Share Results
Posted on November 13th, 2008 and filed under Blogging, Making Money
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