HubShout | Online Marketing Solutions

I've been reading through some other forums I contribute to and an interesting topic came up that ties in with the anchor text blog post Chad and Adam did... While it's good to use keywords in external anchor text which link back to a page on your site, how should you use it internally to link back to the home page?

Here is a excerpt from the forum: Question: Is it still a good idea to link to the homepage using a variety of keyword rich anchor text links?

Answer From User: No I personally would not. It's not natural and could be seen by G as over-optimization. I would only link home page with the anchor text 'home'.

The internal nav links to any page of the site, should represent what that page is. The home page is the home page.

Think of it this way. If Google and search engines did not exist and this site was only for the customer, you would not do that. Your goal would simply be to show them how they could get back "home", right?

I think you may be thinking of EXTERNAL backlinks. There it IS important to diversify links the way you mentioned. I just would not do with home page links.

So is it safe to say that any time on your site which links to your home page, you need to identify the link with "home"?

I notice ours is actually a keyword in the footer "SEO Reseller"

HA! I love SEO. Ask 10 people, get 10 different answers.

I personally link to our homepage from within our site (Onsite link) with keyword targeted anchor ALL the time. Most websites have the majority of their domain authority in their home page - because usually about 80% of the off-site links point there. I think it's fine to build on-site link juice via keyword anchors on your site. Very natural, especially in longer blog posts where you are giving the end-user a real resource to follow. Just don't over-do it. Make sure there is variety. But using Home is not required.

So if you posted "Home - SEO Reseller" or "Home - Hubshout, LLC" it wouldn't have as much of an impact? I looked at the website of the person who responded on the other forum and that's the structure they had.

Correct, that would "water it down" a bit. Why? Because the full weight of the link juice from that page would pass through the anchor "Home SEO Reseller" rather than "SEO Reseller"... Again, I'm not sure why you would do that. If your home page is really about "SEO RESELLER" - it's actually where you want the users to go for that information... All good.... I think over-optimization happens when you try to direct people artificially - though that's fairly hard to define quantitatively.