Contextual Link
What is a Contextual Link?
A Contextual Link is a piece of clickable text (usually a keyword) located in the body of a paragraph that contains similar ideas or context. These links can be natural or artificial. If they are natural, it means they link to another website voluntarily. If they are artificial, it means they have been manually posted. An example of an artificial link is when one of your guests post a link back to your website/blog. When used properly, contextual links can help boost your SEO scores, leading to higher popularity and credibility among search engines - increasing your page's ranking among search results.
What Are The Main Advantages of Contextual Links?
- Increase awareness of your website
- Other companies may include your article on their webpage earning you a backlink and a higher SEO score
- Increased SEO and recognition can lead to an increased social media presence through reposting and sharing
- Help decrease your bounce rate while making the site easier to navigate
- You will earn a higher ranking in search engine results because of increased credibility, relevance, SEO scores, and user experience
- Contextual link building also increases trustworthiness by indicating to users that you aren't afraid to send them elsewhere for a correct answer
- Higher site ranking will generate more traffic - leading to a greater chance of conversions
Best practices for Contextual Links
Including contextual links on your webpage is crucial to SEO. The best websites thrive by fully optimizing contextual links so that they can make the most of their SEO strategy. To optimize each link, the anchor text should be composed of mainly prime keywords. These prime keywords help search engines determine the relevancy of the text when performing search queries. Higher website relevance will lead to higher search rankings and results.
It is also beneficial to use longer descriptive phrases for your contextual links. By using these "Long-Tail" keywords, search engines evaluate your contextual links as more natural. A common myth is that by packing as many keywords into your link as possible, search engines will see it as more relevant; this is not true. If contextual links appear forced, search engines will actually penalize your page's ranking.
Lastly, it is very important that contextual links use authoritative sources that are valuable to the reader. This increases credibility among search engines and is extremely beneficial to the user. If they try to lure visitors to their page for the main goal of increasing traffic, then their bounce rate will increase which produces more harm than benefit.
By following these best practices, you can optimize contextual links on your webpage generating higher SEO scores, and leading to the higher search rankings we are all desperately looking for.
