citations

If you’ve been hanging around blogs over the last year or so, you’ll realize that citations are a big thing. Citation is a skill that bloggers need to learn in the twenty first century in order to see their pages rank well. Think of these like high quality backlinks that affect the overall rank of your blog and also create a pretty large impact on how your audience perceives your blog. What exactly is this citation thing anyway? What are Citations? Citations can simply be thought of as a means of presenting another website as a link within the body text of your own. The term stems from the academic field where extensive literature reviews usually result in citations that are lengthy and reference a large number of topics on the subject at hand. Similarly, citation in a blog or website references relevant topics so that readers who are interested in these topics can get further information if they so desire. Citations make up the major part of creating backlinks for your site in the modern era of search engine optimization. Why are Citations Important? Citations allow for the building of backlinks. The higher the quality of a backlink, the better your page ranks in search results and the more authoritative your own page is in comparison to others on the same topic. Citations are important for two major reasons. Firstly, they allow you to share contact with another, higher-impact blog. If enough traffic comes from your link to their site you may be able to form a suitable link sharing agreement, thereby increasing your traffic. Alternatively, and more importantly, a good backlink foundation allows your website or blog to rank well in relevant search results. The basis of your citations comes from proper use of something called the anchor tag. What is this “Anchor Tag”? Basically, it’s an HTML tag that replaces an actual HTML link with actual words. Thus instead of a URL, you can have a short description that, upon being clicked, sends the user to the URL hidden beneath it. Search engines utilize anchor texts to figure out the content of the site you’ve linked to. This means that proper use of anchor tags can affect both your linked-to sites and your own site. The use of the anchor tag represents a particular metric that search engines have taken to tracking termed link relevancy. Link relevancy is determined by what content is on the source page and what the anchor text attached to that source page represents. Link Relevancy Search engines cleverly utilize human beings penchant for linking relevant things to figure out exactly what the source page is relevant regarding search terms and keywords. Link relevancy indicators utilize this particular inclination along with complicated natural language processing in order to generate an idea of how relevant the link in question really is. Google’s Penguin update started being more specific in its determination of natural search terms and this allowed the algorithm to determine with a good degree of accuracy when it was dealing with non-organic links by determining if the same anchor text yielded the same link results each time. To this end, links should be made throughout the body of a page with as much variety as possible while still remaining relevant to the source page. How Does Anchor Text Affect SEO? As we said before, anchor text allows the building of links that raises the search rank of a page. After understanding search relevancy, we can now form a picture of what our anchor tags should contain to be proper examples of good SEO link building, from Backlinko. Remember that you’re trying to have different anchor texts that lead to your external page in order to create more organic content. To this end, what you should do is to brainstorm possible options that you may have for the creation of alternative anchor texts for your outbound links. It is important that you keep these thoughts in mind when developing your anchor tags: Do NOT create zero-anchor situations such as “Click Here…” Do NOT overuse anchor text. Overuse of anchor text makes a search engine look at your linking suspiciously and may actually hurt your search rank rather than helping it. 5 Types of Anchor Text Anchor text comes in many types and each type has their own particular use. The most common anchor types that you are likely to encounter during your time building SEO type links are: Zero Anchor Text: These are the text anchors that simply come with a “Click Here” appended to them via anchor tag. Not recommended at all. “Naked” URL’s: This also defeats the purpose of the anchor tag as some URL’s are usually made up of non-words and incomprehensible strings of letters. On the off-chance that the link is actually made up of good keywords (as is the case in many links from WordPress blogs), the link might end up helping itself out. Exact Match Anchor: One of the best anchor tags to use in a localized anchor tag strategy. These give a geographical area and a relevant keyword. In some SEO strategies, they allow for more localized searches which can lead to a much higher conversion rate. Partial Match Anchor: This depends upon the ability of a search engine indexing bot to determine the relevant location and other information from the surrounding words in order to rank the link. It has the benefit of allowing you to be freer with your anchor text and helps you create more natural outbound links. Highly recommended. Hybrid Anchor: These are a combination of links that associate different anchor tags with each other allowing for a more targeted strategy, while at the same time giving you the freedom to create links naturally. The links usually relate branded items with non-branded items and are also highly recommended. The flavor of anchor text that you use can make it more difficult for search engines to rank the link and therefore affect … Read more