Blogs and Links

[4little1s]

Hi,

On an average blog post of say 500 words or so, how many links are people putting into their posts typically ? I was wondering if there was a best practice ratio people follow?

 

[Bart Simpson]

The keyword density should not be more than 1-2% of the content so you can use the version of your keyword for 5 times safely in a 500 word post.

 

[Holopainen]

I would even recommend 3-4 keywords per 500 words article. Make it less but better.

 

[ITsoldUK]

Hi,

On an average blog post of say 500 words or so, how many links are people putting into their posts typically ? I was wondering if there was a best practice ratio people follow?

Weeks 1 to 4 - Number of links: 0
Weeks 4 to 10 - Number of links added: 1 (most cases 0)

After that it really depends on the purpose of the link.

Above is what I use for affiliate campaigns but for info posts I very rarely add any links unless it is for reference.

No one size fits all I am afraid.

I take it you were referring to externals not internals?

 

[ITsoldUK]

I would even recommend 3-4 keywords per 500 words article. Make it less but better.

Not relevant to this question old bean...they wanted to know about links

 

[ITsoldUK]

The keyword density should not be more than 1-2% of the content so you can use the version of your keyword for 5 times safely in a 500 word post.

See above....

 

[MarcusMiller]

This is one of those questions where we just have to fall back to common sense.

Q. How many links should you have in each post?
A. However many are relevant to the topic of the post and useful to the reader.

Are these internal links to direct people to relevant and related product pages? Are these external links to other sites? Are these links from external sites to your site?

There are some very obvious examples of good internal linking and Wikipedia is the big one that springs to mind but take a look at something like markdailyapple.com. That is a health and fitness related blog but he puts out a load of good content and does some smart internal linking.

Ultimately, the guy is using content to promote his supplement range and books but he provides a lot of value in the blog posts he puts out there and a lot of really actionable free information. Through this he gets exposure to a wide range of folks interested in health and fitness and therefore, at least open to the idea of his products be that books or supplements.

Provide value and link as appropriate.

 

[rich06]

You should link build sparingly. You always have to consider the link juice when obtaining back-links. If you're targeting a specific keyword, then there is no point providing multiple links on the same page with the same anchor text.

You also want to make sure you're not posting loads of links for lots of different keywords. At most, in any blog post, you only want one or two links.

 

[webgeek]

Some posts should have 0. Others 1+. Some links should be internal, some external. Sometimes people put links to authority sites as well as links to whatever it is they're trying to promote.

In short, do not try to make an ultimate post template and then turn your blog into an IKEA, churning out high volumes of everything looking the same.

Various numbers of links, photos, videos, varying lengths, etc.

 

[Ian J]

Most of my blog posts don't contain any links at all as Google indexes the post as per the content and if it attracts visitors via a search then there are links elsewhere to my main site

 

[ILilja]

I agree with the comment above that relevance should be the most important criterion here. Other than that, I would generally recommend no more than 1-2 links per paragraph - preferably with paragraphs completely without links. Also, if you could put an invitation to read more in the last paragraph, that link is very useful to the minority of readers who actually read your article from top to bottom.

Make sure your most important link is the first one, apply a descriptive anchor text (including your keywords, if relevant) of no more than 2-4 words and make sure that the surrounding text informs the reader where the link is going (this particularly applies of you're linking to a different medium - third party or your own).

 

[4little1s]

Thank you everyone for your replies.

 

[tomkent45]

It very much depend on if the link is relevant. I'd go for three relevant links. If you want to link back to your own company it might be a good idea to include an author bio in which you write down the url to your website.

Good luck!
Tom

 

[WHUK]

Keyword stuffing will do no good to the rankings, in fact you might get penalized because of keyword stuffing. In a post 2 links are fine. It is also important to position them in accordance with the flow of the content.