SEO Techniques - The Contextual Link

Are you ready to get serious about SEO on your site? Then you'll want to pick a specific keyword phrase and focus your homepage on it. Here's why...

One of the most effective tools in the SEO toolbox is the contextual link. In some cases, even contextual links internal to your own site can mean the difference between page one and page two of Google for a specific keyword phrase.

What is a contextual link?

A contextual link is one that includes the keyword phrase you want Google to index your site for. The following somewhat immodest example is a demonstration of a contextual link...

Find out what the world's number one lead generation expert has to say about this crucial new tool in the online marketer's arsenal.

The following example demonstrates a non-contextual link using the exact same sentence...

Find out what the world's number one lead generation expert has to say about this crucial new tool in the online marketer's arsenal.

As you can see, the second non-contextual version of the link seems more natural. Yet it delivers far less benefit to the site owner in SEO terms.

Only works if the resulting content matches

In the above example, the contextual link connects to a page about lead generation. The following parts of the page match the link's context...

The title tag (lead generation expert)
The headline (lead generation)
Text and link in the first paragraph
Overall page content
Most of the other pages on the site

You don't need to have all these elements match for a contextual link to transfer SEO benefit. But you should bare in mind that there's no point using a contextual link to connect to a page that happens to be about some other topic. For example, there's no point using the above 'lead generation' link to connect to a page about stamp collecting.

Are internal contextual links all I need?

Yes, if you have the page rank of Wikipedia. No, if you don't (trust me, you don't). A contextual link is as valuable as the page rank of the page being linked from. You can certainly help Google to better understand what your site is about by using contextual links.

In most cases, you'll need to get inbound contextual links from other sites to make significant improvements in your search engine ranking.

What's more, not all contextual links are born equal. 1,000 inbound contextual links from a site with no page rank is probably worth less in SEO terms than one such link from a site with a page rank of 7.

This is where SEO experts earn their money. They know how to find out which keyword phrases matter, what needs to happen to your content to index well for those phrases, and how to secure excellent external contextual links.