Just caught one of my clients doing the classic – “I’ll make it easy for people to contact me” mistake by putting my email address on the bottom of my post.
Umm, woops! Spam galore coming your way soon. Leave it there for any length of time and I’ll even give a written guarantee on that!
The thinking is sound – you do want to make it easy for people to take the action you want and to contact you. The safest way is to provide a link back to your contact page. One click and they’re done.
A couple of hints for the newbies, there’s smart text linking and then there’s not…
- Always make your text link bold (make it obvious, assume people are dumb and blind)
- Decide whether you want the page to open in a new window or the same window (Most times I go for a new window unless I’m taking them on a journey and they don’t need to refer to the original or previous page)
If you’re opening in the same window make sure that the steps are obvious and congruent to even a 12 year old, always a good litmus test.
What do you want the link text to say?
Most people just use the ‘click here’ and I’ve certainly been guilty of that over the years. What you’re better off using is the actual text that you want to known for or ranked for (SEO stuff). Just having ‘click here’ won’t give you any demerit points so don’t lose any sleep over it BUT if you want to take advantage of every ranking trick you can then just do it.
Why? It’s called the Anchor Text. If the anchor text and the url (web address) line up and the page is relevant to the text then it’ll be deemed authoritative by Google and the other search engines.
If the text says “Contact Peter Butler” and goes to a page containing the url text Peter Butler https://www.smartmortgagemarketing.com.au/contact-peter-butler then I get some link juice for Peter Butler, otherwise I get link juice for ‘click here’ – not something I’m trying to rank for.
Something like this link saying you can get hold of Peter Butler here.
We tell clients this on their coaching calls and when we set up a new sexy Smarter WordPress Websites but then they forget. Hey, we share a lot and it’s a lot to take in, hence this timely reminder. To try and recover an email address when it’s been picked up by a Spam-Bot. Well, good luck with that.
If you’ve done this then go back in ASAP and delete the email address and convert it into a link containing your name or a main keyword you’re trying to rank for.
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