Common Mistakes That Could Spoil Your Internal Links

Internal links can be the life blood of most web sites.If you get them wrong, even slightly wrong, they ruin the overall strengthof your site. I come across a lot of sites where the internal links, whilst well intentioned, and often well planned, have common link errors.

When I say link errors, I am talking about the small things that many would not even consider a problem. Consider the following two:

Control Internal Links To Ensure Your Best Page Ranks,

Control Internal Links To Ensure Your Best Page Ranks

What is the difference? One has a comma and one doesn’t. It should be remembered that anchor text is currently the currency of links. Search engines use that anchor text as an indication of the important key phrase for the page being linked to. Howmany users are going to search using a term that has a comma, full stop or any of the other punctuation marks?

There are two exceptions to this situation. I can accept that users may type a search term using a question mark – do you include the question mark in your anchor text? There are also many users that enter search phrases inside single or double quotes. Including those quotation marks every now and then coud be beneficial.

Do the search engines ignore punctuation marks in anchor text? I have not been able to find an answer to that. However, even if they did, including punctuation marks in anchor text can look untidy and unproffessional. Besides, can you afford to take the risk?

When creating your internal links, use anchor text that is important to the page being linked whilst at the same time being the type of text that users may enter as search terms. You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain by just taking that split second to ensure the anchor text is clean and free from unnecessary punctuation marks.

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