It’s a widely known fact that link anchor text is rated YH2Z675VXTC5 highly by search engines and is often the deciding factor in your SERP position for competitive terms, mainly because it gives meaningful information to users (amongst others). Correct use of anchor text (on both inbound and outbound links) will give your page increased meaning.
I’m sure you use this fact throughout your website while performing onsite SEO. Any tutorial will rightly tell you that keyword relevancy is of upmost importance here. However, a lot of the time you end up with a ‘Home’ link on your menu, linking to your main page.
This is bad for SEO for a number reasons. Firstly, the anchor text ‘home’ is very poor choice of word to use as it’s meaning is highly diluted nowadays. Now unless you have a site relating to homes, the keyword isn’t very useful at all, as we don’t want to rank highly for the term ‘home’. However, at the same time users are familiar with such a link and it makes sense to name such a link to your main page. The situation is worsened if your site is large with a great number of internal links. Imagine having a 100 page site, all with the anchor text ‘home’ – this is a lot of inbound links telling search engines each page is related to ‘home’! Furthermore, the menu link’s are usually towards to the top of the page, giving them inscreased relevancy to search engines.
The solution is a compromise, use ‘home’ along with you main keyword(s) – making sure to avoid obvious stop words like ‘and’. For example ‘Graphic Design Home’. Even better use your main keyword directly in the anchor text i.e. ‘Graphic Design’. This is quite a powerful and simple SEO trick that is easy to implement into your site.
this is a good point. i actually use home at the moment and i think it’s wise to change it but i don’t know what to. i am increasing the amount of links in the nav bar so i’ll be left with little room maybe 1 other word so i’m kind of stuck. any ideas what i could use on my site?
Nice site you have there 🙂
I’ve been having a bit of success lately using ‘yourkeyword home’, so in your case you could try ‘cleaning home’ – if you try and put too many keywords in it looks a bit spammy imo. The company name could just about work too.
It’s definately something to consider, as it’s a link that appears on every page and possibly more importantly, towards the top of the page too – this will be next post I think – content source ordering.
defintely something to consider (though i think clean home is better), but then it may mislead visitors in thinking that the page is for home cleaning. i like the idea though and have already added it to my latest http://www.weddingwheelscarhire.co.uk (nothing there yet but soon to be uploaded), replacing the “home” link to a “wedding wheels” link and it works perfectly.
just had a though that perhaps losing the word solution and going with “green clean” would work for mine.
Yer, I mean anything other thah ‘home’ is going to better really 🙂
Ironically, I just noticed this wordpress theme uses a home image for it’s home link 🙂
Nice article. Like it a lot. Please post more.
Point taken. However there is an element of having to compromise for the usability of the ‘home’ link for users’ benefit.
It is a web-wide standard, and although it is good for SEO, will not help people find your home page (top level) through on site navigation.
Interesting theory though, definitely worth considering for larger sites.
Yer, I agree. If your keywords allow it you can subtely replace the home link with your main keyword. However, it’s not possible on some sites due to it looking far to spammy and compriomising useability. Definately an extra little thing you can throw into your seo though 🙂
Since our site name is only one word and only a few letters, I think changing “home” menu to our site name makes sense. Anyway, most users already know that the menu on the extreme left is the home menu.