When search engine spiders crawl your blog, they don’t read every word. Instead, they scan for certain parts of your post: the headline, subheaders, alt-text of images, and anchor text. Anchor text is the word or phrase you highlight when you insert a hyperlink. Choosing the right words to hyperlink can help add some important SEO value.
In addition to choosing the right words, you want to think about the placement of those words. If you link to the same internal page multiple times in a single blog post, make sure you optimize the first occurrence of that link. Typically, search engines will rely more heavily on the first instance of anchor text for a given link than subsequent instances.
SEO and analytics company Moz has a great post and illustration that explains this practice. So whenever you use your blog to link to other content on your site, make sure that the first reference point includes the best keywords.
You also want to ensure you’re linking to the right pages. Instead of dispersing your links and anchor text to a number of different pages, It may be better to point all of your traffic and internal links to a page that is already ranking so you can further advance its SEO weight.
Below is a list of pages on our website that rank for the phrase “keyword data.” One page currently ranks fifth on Google for that keyword phrase. The other two pages rank much lower. We could drive traffic to the second and third pages on that list, but it probably would be a waste.
Moving a page from a rank of 100+ to a rank of 99 doesn’t help much, since most clicks on search engine results pages go to the first few. Choosing to point our internal links to that high-ranking page and possibly moving it from fifth-highest to fourth-highest, however, would have a huge impact.