May

A Nifty SEO Trick For Your Blog

By Sid

I read about a search engine optimization trick yesterday that fewer than 10% of the existing web sites today deploy… and probably fewer than ONE percent of blogs.

The trick is something SEO guru Leslie Rohde talks about, and it is a concept called First Link Priority.

More than likely you aren’t following the rule of First Link Priority with your web site, and it is highly unlikely that you’re doing it with your blog.

What is First Link Priority and Why Should You Care?

Leslie explains it this way:

The first link that a search engine spider encounters in your web page’s code is the link to which the spider gives the MOST WEIGHT.

Another way of saying this is that when the search engine spider encounters your web page, it wants to learn what your web site is all about. When it says, “this site is about X” it pays particular attention to the first link in your HTML code.

And since most web sites do (and should) have the navigation bar at the top of the page (deemed best location according to recent eye tracking studies), the first link the spider will see is your link to “Home”.

Yikes! The spider gives special weight to “Home”? That’s not so good.

How to Change Your First Link Priority

Your web folks should be able to make the change easily with most web sites. Ideally, what you’ll want is to change the “Anchor text” (the text that appears on the page) to include your primary keyword.

For example, for my personal business site, I want to emphasize that I am a “B2B Web Copywriter”. If I were to change “Home” to “B2B Web Copywriter Home”, the HTML code would look like this:

<a href=”http://www.sidsmith.com/”>B2B Web Copywriter Home</a>

That seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it?

But what about with a Blog? Typically, you can’t change the anchor text for “Home” in your blog template in your Admin area. But, never fear. There is a way…

More than likely the navigation bar for your template is in a file called “header.php”. You can edit it within your Wordpress Admin area as follows:

1. Navigate to the php code editor:

You’ll click on “Appearance” and then “Editor”.

2. Open the “header.php” file:

3. Change the HTML code.

Scroll down until you find the Navigation bar code. It might look something like this:

You’ll note that in the above code, I added a “title”. This is the text that will appear if you hover over the link. It adds a little extra weight to the keywords I want to emphasize for the page.

Then, all I’d have to do is change the “Home” to “B2B Web Copywriting Home”.

I’d save the file and be done with it.

Why not try this yourself. It’s not hard, and it just might give you that one little extra push that rolls your site onto the first page of Google for your primary keyword phrase.

Good luck, and let me know how it goes.

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