As you start to blog, you’ll find that your long form blog posts often rank higher in Google than the shorter ones.
Blog post “length” and “rank” are not necessarily linked by causation, but research suggests that the longer the post, perhaps the better in terms of position in the SERPs1.
To quote Brian Dean from a post on SEO on his site Backlinko:
4. Based on SERP data from SEMRush, we found that longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results. The average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.
So if blog post length is important, that begs the question…
What else, besides length, can you do to make your blog posts more useful to your readers?
Creating HTML Links to a Specific Place in Your Webpage
One thing you can do is make your longer posts easier to navigate with internal links.
Internal hyperlinks can help your readers find things they’re interested in, more quickly.
For example, I wrote a post about “Eco-Friendly Small Businesses” that people can start.
In this post, I list 50 different “eco-friendly” small businesses across 8 separate sustainability categories.
Since it’s a lot of different business concepts, I included internal HTML links from various places within the post to different small business sections to help the reader save time.
Whether you have one internal link or fifty, it’s easy to do once you know how.
Here’s how you can create links to different sections of your blog posts from within your posts.
Step 1) Create an HTML “Object” to Link To
The first thing you do is make a list of “objects” that you will link to from somewhere in your blog post.
An “object” is just a piece of text that describes what you want to link to.
In my “eco-friendly small business” post, I included 50 separate objects that were linked to.
One of them was called “solar installer” which is below in red text:
- solar_installer
Step 2) Link From The Object To The Related Section of Your Post
Add an HTML hyperlink that links to the object you created. Add a hash sign # before the object name as shown below.
<a href="#solar_installer">The Solar Installer hyperlink the reader will click</a>
Step 3) Wrap the Object in HTML Anchor Link:
Add your object to the location destination where you want your reader to end up when they click the link.
<a id="solar_installer">The Solar Installer part of the post they will end up on after they click</a>
To summarize, in Step 1) you’ll create the object you want to use as your internal link. In Step 2) you’ll create an internal hyperlink using a # sign followed by your object as the destination you will link to (in this case “solar_installer”). In Step 3) you’ll link your object with the text in your post. You do this by using “id” and an = sign as the identifier for the text you want to link to when a reader clicks on your object.
That’s it!