SEO
What It Is & How To Use It
Link attributes abound in the world of SEO, including link title, alternative text, and others.
In fact, there are newer rules you need to use if you wish to remain up-to-date on your link optimization.
These types of attributes are important. Not only do they help clarify the context of your link, but they also help to control how Google perceives it.
Whether it’s a paid link or free, you need to make sure you are using the correct attributes so Google does not misunderstand the meaning of your links, resulting in substandard results.
And SEO is all about results!
The way you get to better results is by applying best practices and ensuring that you don’t run afoul of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Using duplicate alternative text as the link title text is not an okay practice, for example. There are different ways to use alternative text and title text, both of which an SEO pro must pay attention to.
The following includes an overview of the link title attribute and the things you need to know about it in order to be successful.
Let’s dive right in!
Link Title Attribute Best Practices
You should use a link title when you are providing more information about the link.
Don’t use a link title to provide the information over again, as this is a usability fail that will only result in annoying your users.
Have you ever run into an incident where the exact link title showed up when you hovered over it?
You didn’t need to know something that’s already visible on the page, right?
Some of your users may think that way, as well.
The best question you can ask yourself when optimizing is: Will this add information to my link or will it just annoy my users with duplication?
Focus On Optimizing For Users, Rather Than Search Engines
Optimize for your users, rather than search engines.
Yes, this is nothing new. But it is effective.
Don’t:
- Overstuff the link title attribute with keywords.
- Duplicate the topic title.
Do:
- Write the link title so that something unique pops up for users.
- Write the link title with users in mind.
The link anchor text is supposed to be the name of the link itself.
The link title attribute is supposed to provide more information about where the link will send the user who clicks on that link.
How, Exactly, Should You Be Using The Link Title Attribute?
Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller has detailed this in a past Google Webmaster Office Hours Hangout. This discussion begins at the 00:42 point.
Google uses both the title attribute and anchor text together within the link in order to increase their understanding of the context of the link.
He explains that you can test this with a word that you made up, and add it as a title attribute.
Then, you can wait a bit for things to be indexed, and then you can examine the results of that after it has been indexed.
Ideally, one could use the title attribute in order to cover information that’s missing in the anchor text. And Google will use these two attributes together when crawling your links.
Does The Link Title Attribute Help Support Accessibility?
There is some disagreement among SEO pros as to whether accessibility should not be included in SEO best practices.
I’m of the opinion that accessibility, while not a direct ranking factor, is one of those indirect ranking factors that are indisputable in terms of their value.
This will help improve your client’s site and their bottom line by reducing accessibility lawsuits for not including basic accessibility items like alternative text.
(Being inclusive also expands your audience and customer base.)
Alternative text, or alt text for short, is an image attribute that gives text to screen readers for the blind.
In principle, you would think the link title attribute works in a similar way.
However, this is not the case.
The W3C states the following:
“Current user agents and assistive technology provide no feedback to the user when links have title attribute content available.
Some graphical user agents will display a tool tip when the mouse hovers above an anchor element containing a title attribute. However, current user agents do not provide access to title attribute content via the keyboard.
The tool tip in some common user agents disappears after a short period of time (approximately five seconds).
This can cause difficulty accessing title attribute content for those users who can use a mouse but have fine motor skill impairment, and may result in difficulties for users who need more time to read the tool tip.
Current graphical user agents do not provide mechanisms to control the presentation of title attribute content.
The user cannot resize the tool tip text or control the foreground and background colors.
The placement and location of the tool tip cannot be controlled by users, causing some screen magnifier users to be unable to access meaningful portions of the title attribute content because the tool tip cannot be fully displayed within the viewport.
Some user agents allow access to supplementary information through the context menu.
For example, the keystroke combination Shift+F10 followed by P will display the title attribute content, along with other supplementary information in Mozilla/Firefox.”
It’s not perfect, so it is almost impossible to provide a good way to implement accessibility in this scenario.
This is why it is important to take a more in-depth look at guidelines for these elements.
They don’t always work the way you think they should and, in some cases, changes to the elements can happen in a flash also.
How to Use The Link Title Attribute: An Example
Here’s an example of how to use the link title attribute correctly:
<a href=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/” title=”This is a link to the Search Engine Journal website”>SEJ</a>
What Do The Search Engines Say?
We can speculate all day long, but at the end of the day, the final word of the search engines on the link title attribute is this:
“The ‘title’ attribute is a bit different: It ‘offers advisory information about the element for which it is set.’
As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the ‘alt’ attribute.
Feel free to supplement the ‘alt’ attribute with ‘title’ and other attributes if they provide value to your users!”
This is what Bing has to say:
“Think of the anchor text as your primary description of the linked page.
But if you do inline linking within the paragraphs of your body text, you need to maintain the natural, logical flow of the language in the paragraph, which can limit your link text description.
As such, you can use the title attribute to add additional keyword information about the linked page without adversely affecting the readability of the text for the end user.”
What Do Other SEO Professionals Say?
Based on the opinions of several people who have done SEO for years, the link title attribute carries no weight on search engines.
There is also some usability concern when it comes to the link title attribute.
For most browsers, it will show up when you move your cursor over the link.
Because of this, you don’t have to copy the anchor text within a title attribute. If the title attribute is unable to provide additional information, you should not use it.
“Do not add link titles to all links: If it is obvious from the link anchor and its surrounding context where the link will lead, then a link title will reduce usability by being one more thing users have to look at.”
The Rise In Accessibility Lawsuits: Should You Be Concerned?
On January 4, 2019, it was reported that Beyonce.com was sued over accessibility issues.
Target has also been sued over accessibility issues in the past.
Accessibility should always be a concern for SEO professionals because you are supposed to be driving revenue and increasing ROI for your clients.
When an accessibility lawsuit happens, your client loses money, or ROI, from the lack of these efforts. In addition, they are usually not happy about your website.
Your efforts as an SEO should include making sure that link title attributes and links are visible and usable by your users, regardless of their abilities.
Focus On Your Users, Not The Search Engines
When writing link title attributes, be sure to write for users, and don’t create spammy text just for the search engines.
Because, it will be users who are – primarily – going to be using this title text.
At the end of the day, accessibility matters:
- Don’t make links hard to read.
- Don’t make link titles difficult to use, or understand.
Make things look great while focusing on the user experience in order to make sure that your users are happy and elated to be on your website.
TL;DR: Key Takeaways
The key takeaways include the following:
- Don’t use duplicate alt and title attributes in your links.
- Do focus on your users when writing these, but also focus on what the search engines will crawl.
- Do focus on what missing information will be added by using the title attribute.
- Do optimize your links if the title attribute adds new information.
- Do not use the title attribute if it does not add new information.
- Make sure that you use these attributes in such a way that fosters great accessibility for users with disabilities.
- Don’t over-optimize. Avoid adding title attributes to links that don’t need them.
If you are in doubt about whether a link title attribute is something that is going to benefit you, it’s probably best not to use it. And instead, consult John Mueller or another SEO professional that you trust.
John is known to hang out on Twitter and answer burning questions from SEO professionals around the world, in addition to his office hours hangouts.
More Resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
SEO
Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]
![Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Holistic-Marketing-Strategies-That-Drive-Revenue-SaaS-Case-Study.png "Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]")
Brands are seeing success driving quality pipeline and revenue growth. It’s all about building an intentional customer journey, aligning sales + marketing, plus measuring ROI.
Check out this executive panel on-demand, as we show you how we do it.
With Ryann Hogan, senior demand generation manager at CallRail, and our very own Heather Campbell and Jessica Cromwell, we chatted about driving demand, lead gen, revenue, and proper attribution.
This B2B leadership forum provided insights you can use in your strategy tomorrow, like:
- The importance of the customer journey, and the keys to matching content to your ideal personas.
- How to align marketing and sales efforts to guide leads through an effective journey to conversion.
- Methods to measure ROI and determine if your strategies are delivering results.
While the case study is SaaS, these strategies are for any brand.
Watch on-demand and be part of the conversation.
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Navigating SERP Complexity: How to Leverage Search Intent for SEO
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SEO
What Marketers Need to Learn From Hunter S. Thompson
We’ve passed the high-water mark of content marketing—at least, content marketing in its current form.
After thirteen years in content marketing, I think it’s fair to say that most of the content on company blogs was created by people with zero firsthand experience of their subject matter. We have built a profession of armchair commentators, a class of marketers who exist almost entirely in a world of theory and abstraction.
I count myself among their number. I have hundreds of bylines about subfloor moisture management, information security, SaaS pricing models, agency resource management. I am an expert in none of these topics.
This has been the happy reality of content marketing for over a decade, a natural consequence of the incentives created by early Google Search. Historically, being a great content marketer required precisely no subject matter expertise. It was enough to read widely and write quickly.
Mountains of organic traffic have been built on the backs of armchair commentators like myself. Time spent doing deep, detailed research was, generally speaking, wasted, because 80% of the returns came from simply shuffling other people’s ideas around and slapping a few keyword-targeted H2s in the right places.
But this doesn’t work today.
For all of its flaws, generative AI is an excellent, truly world-class armchair commentator. If the job-to-be-done is reading a dozen articles and how-to’s and turning them into something semi-original and fairly coherent, AI really is the best tool for the job. Humans cannot out-copycat generative AI.
Put another way, the role of the content marketer as a curator has been rendered obsolete. So where do we go from here?
Hunter S. Thompson popularised the idea of gonzo journalism, “a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative.”
In other words, Hunter was the story.
When asked to cover the rising phenomenon of the Hell’s Angels, he became a Hell’s Angel. During his coverage of the ‘72 presidential campaign, he openly supported his preferred candidate, George McGovern, and actively disparaged Richard Nixon. His chronicle of the Kentucky Derby focused almost entirely on his own debauchery and chaos-making—a story that has outlasted any factual account of the race itself.
In the same vein, content marketers today need to become their stories.
It’s a content marketing truism that it’s unreasonable to expect writers to become experts. There’s a superficial level of truth to that claim—no content marketer can acquire a decade’s worth of experience in a few days or weeks—but there are great benefits awaiting any company willing to challenge that truism very, very seriously.
As Thompson proved, short, intense periods of firsthand experience can yield incredible insights and stories. So what would happen if you radically reduced your content output and dedicated half of your content team’s time to research and experimentation? If their job was doing things worth writing about, instead of just writing? If skin-in-the-game, no matter how small, was a prerequisite of the role?
We’re already seeing this shift.
Every week, I see more companies hiring marketers who are true, bonafide subject matter experts (I include the Ahrefs content team here—for the majority of our team, “writing” is a skill secondary to a decade of hands-on search and marketing experience). They are expensive, hard to find, and in the era of AI, worth every cent.
I see a growing expectation that marketers will document their experiences and experiments on social media, creating meta-content that often outperforms the “real” content. I see more companies willing to share subjective experiences and stories, and avoid competing solely on the sharing of objective, factual information. I see companies spending money to promote the personal brands of in-house creators, actively encouraging parasocial relationships as their corporate brand accounts lay dormant.
These are ideas that made no sense in the old model of content marketing, but they make much more sense today. This level of effort is fast becoming the only way to gain any kind of moat, creating material that doesn’t already exist on a dozen other company blogs.
In the era of information abundance, our need for information is relatively easy to sate; but we have a near-limitless hunger for entertainment, and personal interaction, and weird, pattern-interrupting experiences.
Gonzo content marketing can deliver.
SEO
I Got 129.7% More Traffic With Related Keywords
A few weeks ago, I optimized one of my blog posts for related keywords. Today, it gets an estimated 2,300 more monthly organic visits:
In this post, I’ll show you how I found and optimized my post for these related keywords.
Related keywords are words and phrases closely linked to your main keyword. There are many ways to find them. You can even just ask ChatGPT.
But here’s the thing: These keywords aren’t useful for optimizing content.
If more traffic is your goal, you need to find keywords that represent subtopics—not just any related ones.
Think of it like this: you improve a recipe by adding the right ingredients, not everything in your fridge!
Below are two methods for finding the right related keywords (including the one I used):
Method 1. Use content optimization tools
Content optimization tools look for keywords on other top-ranking pages but not yours. They usually then recommend adding these keywords to your content a certain number of times.
These tools can be useful if you take their recommendations with a pinch of salt, as some of them can lead you astray.
For example, this tool recommends that I add six mentions of the phrase “favorite features” to our keyword research guide.
Does that seem like an important related keyword to you? It certainly doesn’t to me!
They also usually have a content score that increases as you add the recommended related keywords. This can trick you into believing that something is important when it probably isn’t—especially as content scores have a weak correlation with rankings.
My advice? If you’re going to use these tools, apply common sense and look for recommendations that seem to represent important subtopics.
For example, when I analyze our content audit guide, it suggests adding quite a few keywords related to content quality.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is an extremely important consideration for a content audit—yet our guide mentions nothing about it.
This is a huge oversight and definitely a batch of related keywords worth optimizing for.
Try the beta version of our new AI Content Helper!
Instead of counting terms that you need to include in your content, Content Helper uses AI to identify the core topics for your target keywords and scores your content (as well as your competitors) against those topics as you write it. In effect, it groups related keywords by subtopic, making it easier to optimize for the broader picture.
For example, it looks like my post doesn’t cover Google Business Profile optimization too well. This is something it might be worth going into more detail about.
Method 2. Do a keyword gap analysis (this is the method I used!)
Keyword gaps are when competitors rank for keywords you don’t. If you do this analysis at the page level, it’ll uncover related keywords—some of which will usually represent subtopics.
If possible, I recommend doing this for pages that already rank on the first page for their main target keyword. These pages are doing well already and likely just need a bit of a push to rank high and for more related keywords. You can find these in Site Explorer:
- Enter your domain
- Go to the Organic Keywords report
- Filter for positions 2-10
- Look for the main keywords you’re targeting
Once you have a few contenders, here’s how to do a keyword gap analysis:
a) Find competitors who are beating you
In the Organic Keywords report, hit the SERP dropdown next to the keyword to see the current top-ranking pages. Look for similar pages that are getting more traffic than yours and have fewer referring domains.
For example, our page ranks #10 for “local SEO,” has 909 referring domains, and gets an estimated 813 monthly visits:
All of these competing pages get more traffic with fewer backlinks:
Sidenote.
I’m going to exclude the page from Moz going forward as it’s a blog category page. That’s very different to ours so it’s probably not worth including in our analysis.
b) Send them to the content gap tool
Hit the check boxes next to your competitors, then click “Open In” and choose Content gap.
By default, this will show you keywords where one or more competitors rank in the top 10, but you don’t rank anywhere in the top 100.
I recommend changing this so it shows all keywords competitors rank for, even if you also rank for them. This is because you may still be able to better optimize for related keywords you already rank for.
I also recommend turning the “Main results only” filter on to exclude rankings in sitelinks and other SERP features:
c) Look for related keywords worth optimizing for
This is where common sense comes into play. Your task is to scan the list for related keywords that could represent important subtopics.
For example, keywords like these aren’t particularly useful because they’re just different ways of searching for the main topic of local SEO:
But a related keyword like “what is local SEO” is useful because it represents a subtopic searchers are looking for:
If this process feels too much like trying to find a needle in a haystack, try exporting the full list of keywords, pasting them into Keywords Explorer, and going to the “Cluster by terms” report. As the name suggests, this groups keywords into clusters by common terms:
This is useful because it can highlight common themes among related keywords and helps you to spot broader gaps.
For example, when I was looking for related keywords for our SEO pricing guide (more on this later!), I saw 17 related keywords containing the term “month”:
Upon checking the keywords, I noticed that they’re all ways of searching for how much SEO costs per month:
This is an easy batch of related keywords to optimize for. All I need to do is answer that question in the post.
If you’re still struggling to spot good related keywords, look for ones sending competing pages way more traffic than you. This usually happens because competitors’ pages are better optimized for those terms.
You can spot these in the content gap report by comparing the traffic columns.
For example, every competing page is getting more traffic than us for the keyword “how much does SEO cost”—and Forbes is getting over 300 more visits!
Now you have a bunch of related keywords, what should you do with them?
This is a nuanced process, so I’m going to show you exactly how I did it for our local SEO guide. Its estimated organic traffic grew by 135% after my optimizations for related keywords:
Sidenote.
Google kindly rolled out a Core update the day after I did these optimizations, so there’s always a chance the traffic increase is unrelated. That said, traffic to our blog as a whole stayed pretty consistent after the update, while this post’s traffic grew massively. I’m pretty sure the related keyword optimization is what caused this.
Here are the related keywords I optimized it for and how:
Related keyword 1: “What is local SEO”
Every competing page was getting significantly more traffic than us for this keyword (and ranking significantly higher). One page was even getting an estimated 457 more visits than ours per month:
People were also searching for this in a bunch of different ways:
My theory on why we weren’t performing well for this? Although we did have a definition on the page, it wasn’t great. It was also buried under a H3 with a lot of fluff to read before you get to it.
I tried to solve this by getting rid of the fluff, improving the definition (with a little help from ChatGPT), and moving it under a H2.
Result? The page jumped multiple positions for the keyword “what is local SEO” and a few other similar related keywords:
Related keyword 2: Local SEO strategy
Once again, all competing pages were getting more traffic than ours from this keyword.
I feel like the issue here may be that there’s no mention of “strategy” in our post, whereas competitors mention it multiple times.
To solve this, I added a short section about local SEO strategy.
I also asked ChatGPT to add “strategy” to the definition of local SEO. (I’m probably clutching at straws with this one, but it reads nicely with the addition, so… why not?)
Result? The page jumped seven positions from the bottom of page two to page one for the related keyword:
Related keyword 3: “How to do local SEO”
Most of the competing pages were getting more traffic than us for this keyword—albeit not a lot.
However, I also noticed Google shows this keyword in the “things to know” section when you search for local SEO—so it seems pretty important.
I’d also imagine that anyone searching for local SEO wants to know how to do it.
Unfortunately, although our guide does show you how to do local SEO, it’s kind of buried in a bunch of uninspiring chapters. There’s no obvious “how to do it” subheading for readers (or Google) to skim, so you have to read between the lines to figure out the “how.”
In an attempt to solve this, I restructured the content into steps and put it under a new H2 titled “How to do local SEO”:
Result? Position #7 → #4
No. Nothing in SEO is guaranteed, and this is no different.
In fact, I optimized our SEO pricing guide for related keywords on the same day, and—although traffic did improve—it only improved by around 23%:
Sidenote.
You might have noticed the results were a bit delayed here. I think this is because the keywords the post ranks for aren’t so popular, so they’re not updated as often in Ahrefs.
For full transparency, here’s every related keyword I optimized the post for and the results:
Related keyword 1: “How much does SEO cost”
Each competing page got more traffic than ours from this keyword, with one getting an estimated 317 more monthly visits:
When I clustered the keywords by terms in Keywords Explorer, I also saw ~70 keywords containing the word “much” (this was around 19% of all keywords in the Content Gap report!):
These were all different ways of searching for how much SEO costs:
The issue here appears to be that although we do answer the question on the page, it’s quite buried. There’s no obvious subheading with the answer below it, making it hard for searchers (and possibly Google) to skim and find what they’re looking for:
To solve this, I added a H2 titled “How much does SEO cost?” and added a direct answer below.
Result? No change in rankings for the related keyword itself, but the page did win a few snippets for longer-tail variations thanks to the copy I added:
Related keyword 2: “SEO cost per month”
Nearly all competing pages were getting more traffic than us for this keyword, with one getting an estimated 72 monthly visits more than more us.
The term clustering report in Keywords Explorer also showed that people are searching for the monthly cost of SEO in different ways:
This is not the case for hourly or retainer pricing; there are virtually no searches for this.
I think we’re not ranking for this because we haven’t prioritized this information on the page. The first subheading is all about hourly pricing, which nobody cares about. Monthly pricing data is buried below that.
To fix this, I moved the data on monthly pricing further up the page and wrote a more descriptive subheading (“Monthly retainer pricing” →“Monthly retainer pricing: How much does SEO cost per month?”).
I also changed the key takeaways in the intro to focus more on monthly pricing, as this is clearly what people care about. Plus, I simplified it and made it more prominent so searchers can find the information they’re actually looking for faster.
Result? The page won the featured snippet for this related keyword and a few other variations:
Related keyword 3: “Local SEO pricing”
I found this one in the term clustering report in Keywords Explorer, as 16 keywords contained the term “local.”
Upon further inspection, I realized these were all different ways of searching for the cost of local SEO services.
I think the problem here is although our post has some data on local SEO pricing, it doesn’t have the snappy figure searchers are likely looking for. Plus, even the information we did have was buried deep on the page.
So… I actually pulled new statistics from the data we collected for the post, then put them under a new H3 titled “How much does local SEO cost?”
Result? Small but notable improvements for this keyword and a few other variations:
Related keyword 4: “How much does SEO cost for a small business”
I saw that one competing page was getting an estimated 105 more monthly organic visits than us from this term.
When clustering by terms in Keywords Explorer, I also saw a cluster of nine keywords containing the word “small.” These were all different ways of searching for small business SEO pricing:
Once again, the issue here is clear: the information people are looking for isn’t on the page. There’s not even a mention of small businesses.
This is good as it means the solution is simple: add an answer to the page. I did this and put it under a new H3 titled “How much does SEO cost for small businesses?”
Result? #15 → #5 for this related keyword, and notable improvements for a few other variations:
Related keyword 5: “SEO pricing models”
This related keyword probably isn’t that important, but I spotted it looking through the Content gap report and thought it’d be pretty easy to optimize for.
All I did was create a new H2 titled “SEO pricing models: a deeper breakdown of costs.” I then briefly explained the three common pricing models under this and re-jigged and nested the rest of the content from the page under there.
Result? #5 → #1:
Final thoughts
Related keyword optimization isn’t about shoehorning a bunch of keyword variations into your content. Google is smart enough to know that things like “SEO” and “search engine optimization” mean the same thing.
Instead, look for keywords that represent subtopics and make sure you’re covering them well. This might involve adding a new section or reformatting an existing section for more clarity.
This is easy to do. It took me around 2-3 hours per page.
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