Using Named Anchors In Your Posts – G’s Latest Addition
If you haven’t noticed it already, Google’s latest addition to their search listings(related onpage named anchors) have opened up the ability for bloggers to push their search engine traffic directly to the most relevant information in their posts.
How is this beneficial exactly?
It could be said that a potential problem with blog posts is that your visitors are required to read through the entire post sometimes before they are able to find the information they are really looking for.
Using named anchors within your posts enables you to place a table of contents at the top of the page containing links to anchors positioned throughout the post. Taking advantage of this style of page now pushes the G spider to index these links in their search results.
Having this ability creates an avenue to drive visitors directly to the information they are after, intern heightening their experience, which we all know increases the likelihood of them subscribing or at least clicking your affiliate or Adsense links.
<a name=”ANCHORNAME”>ANCHOR TEXT GOES HERE</a>
You will notice at the top of this page there is a table of contents with anchor links that when clicked take you directly to the information on the page regarding the topic it’s on.
Now let’s say you’re looking to write a post about cell phones(boring example I know but let’s just go with it for now), more particularly the post you’re intending to write will be in the form of a review about 3 different cell phone brands - iPhone, Blackberry and Palm.
You now have an opportunity to use named anchors within your post. Quite simply all you would need to do is place 3 links at the top of your page, one for each(iPhone, Blackberry and Palm), linking them directly to the named anchors positioned at the different sections of the review.
So just to clarify how these named anchors would appear in Google. Let’s say I ran a search for cell phones, assuming the Google search bot indexed your named anchors correctly, the links for iPhone, Blackberry and Palm will appear below the page description. See the image below for a real life example -
You may have already noticed the current version of Wordpress DOES NOT have a function to allow you to place in named anchors directly from the visual editor, therefore you will have to use HTML.
The good thing is, it’s incredibly easy for those who have none or little experience in web-based code.
Use the HTML editor inside the Wordpress Administration to enter in HTML code similar to the following example -
You can directly copy and paste the above code into your own posts if you wish, making sure to change both the anchor names(#anchor1 and #anchor2) and the anchor text(ANCHOR LINK ONE and ANCHOR LINK TWO) You can place it at the top of the different sections on your page, effectively they will act as the titles of the subsections of your article.
For the anchor name, use something relevant to the link you are creating. It’s important to note only the anchor text will be indexed by Google.
Finally you’re going to need to create links at the top of the page to these named anchors. Most marketers tend to agree the best way of listing these links is in bulletpoint format, just how I have done so at the top of this post.
You don’t have to use the same text in these links as you did with your named anchors as these will not be shown in Google. To link to a named anchor, you can just use the link tool in Wordpress and type in the following address #anchorname.
One thing I feel is important to mention is that you don’t have to use the named anchor as a section title, you can always just place it somewhere within the body of the post.
One thing which seemingly is necessary however is a table of contents somewhere on the page which is mentioned on the Google Webmaster Central blog
Very simply put, this is a new concept by Google, who are obviously trying to connect their audience with the information they are after faster. That means right now it’s rare to see related links produced from named anchors appearing in search results.
To the person scouring through the results, having relevant links to information on the page which they may be after is enticing, therefore it’s a great idea to start taking advantage of this feature whenever possible.
Of course not all posts you write in the future fit the model of a table of contents style article, however when the opportunity arises it might be worth taking advantage of it?
Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com
