A friend of mine who writes Lawn Mower reviews and Leaf Blower Vacuum reviews on his blog (yardtoolsguide.com) recently asked me to check out his blog and see if he was getting the first link priority to his page right. I did help him out and found that his first link priority was not really working well. This post speaks in detail about what changes were made and how you can also incorporate it in your thesis powered wordpress blog. First off, if you are not sure what first priority link means then read the following section. If you already know what it means skip the next section.
What is First Link Priority?
When search engines (like google, Bing, Yahoo) look at a webpage to index, they scan and analyze the page for outbound links. When the search engine finds the same outbound link multiple times (or more than once), it only takes into account the first link and completely ignores the rest of the links. So all the pagerank/SEO juice that you thought will pass from all your subsequent links, never really happens. One prime example of this, especially on thesis, is you may have a header image on the blog that links to your homepage and then you may also have a “Home” link in your navigation menu that also links to your homepage. In the case of the header image, the anchor text that will be used will be your site url and the “Home” link would have an anchor text of “Home”. Both these links could be optimized better to use your targeted keywords as anchor text and this will help with the overall SEO for the blog as all pages on the blog will have a link back to the home page. Now in the case of my buddy’s blog, he had used thesis hooks to make his navigation menu appear below his header image. So the header image was the first link to the home page on all the pages of his blog. The search engines would completely ignore the “Home” link on all the pages as this link would be the second link to the same home page.
For a more detailed explanation of first link priority, check out this post on the Noble Samurai blog.
Optimizing First Link Priority On The Thesis Theme
The YardToolsGuide.com blog had the header image placed above the Navigation menu by using the “thesis_hook_before_header” and the “thesis_hook_after_header” hooks in the custom_functions.php file. If you wish to do this, the code to that looks like this.
remove_action('thesis_hook_before_header','thesis_nav_menu');
add_action('thesis_hook_after_header','thesis_nav_menu');
Next, to optimize the first link to the home page on all pages, we inserted the following code. This code uses the “thesis_hook_header” hook and uses the better keywords as anchor text.
function add_custom_site_name_anchor()
{
?>
<h1 id="logo"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Mower And Blower Vac Reviews</a></h1>
<?php
}
remove_action('thesis_hook_header', 'thesis_default_header');
add_action('thesis_hook_header', 'add_custom_site_name_anchor');
The remove_action will remove the default header that is added by WordPress with the sit url as the anchor text and replaces it with the keywords as the anchor text. Now all the pages on his blog are linking to the homepage with these keywords. Take a look at the source of this of this WORX Trivac review post that shows the new keywords as anchor text.
<div id="header"> <h1 id="logo"><a href="http://www.yardtoolsguide.com">Mower And Blower Vac Reviews</a></h1> </div>
Hopefully this will give a boost to his blog for the keywords we targeted. Life is so much easier with the Thesis framework for wordpress.