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Anchor Text: Good, Better, and Best Examples

  • February 9, 2021

Anchor text is an important and often overlooked aspect of SEO onsite optimization. Understanding the role it plays in crawling evaluations can help you eke out incrementally better performance.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text refers to the words you click on when clicking a hyperlink on a website. Traditionally they are blue and underlined. While it may seem like a technical necessity, there is an art and a strategy to selecting text. The more you can tell your visitor about where they will go when they click the link, the better. Think about anchor text as a keyword, and a link as a vote in favor of the destination URL to rank for that keyword.

Examples of good, better, and best

  • For our good example, we’ll make a link that is merely functional. It takes you from the page you are currently on to where you want to go.

    To learn more about Lorem Ipsum, click here: https://www.dijonmarketing.com/blog/what-is-lorem-ipsum/

    In the above example, the raw URL is not terrible since the URL has been well optimized for SEO and easily tells you the content of the link.
  • Still, it would be better to define some anchor text and hide the big, long URL. It can help with formatting as well not trying to cram that big long string onto a single line.

    To learn more about Lorem Ipsum, click here.

    That is much more compact and visually appealing. However, it is a little bit old school. When the internet was brand new and navigation wasn’t intuitive, it gave the user a directive of what to do. But it tells them nothing about what they will find.
  • The best anchor text in this scenario would tell the user what they will discover, as well as give directives to crawlers about the most valuable content available for a set of keywords.

    Continue reading to learn more about Lorem Ipsum.

    In today’s web, users can be trusted to know what a hyperlink looks like and to be able to decipher clickable text, so the words “click here” don’t need to appear.

You can see the evolution from good to better to best. If you discipline yourself to stop and think before every link is added to your website, you will see a benefit in your SEO performance. It’s a lot easier to do it right the first time than to go back and correct everything. Next time you see a good or better example, you’ll know how to make it best!

Google for Nonprofits 2020 year end message

  • December 17, 2020

It is a great privilege to be able to assist multiple nonprofits in how to navigate Google for Nonprofits. I help with everything from how to judge eligibility, enrollment, enabling products, and staying compliant with the many rules and regulations required once approved. It can be daunting for the uninitiated, but with a little help, the rewards are great.

Did you know that Google for Nonprofits is a full grant program that spans many of Google’s Business solutions? The entire GSuite line of products, which includes Gmail, Calendars, User admin, Google Meet, and more is a great way to establish a cloud-based email system. Google Ads also let you advertise for free on Google search results pages for certain key terms. There are also programs for YouTube and Google Maps.

These tools help nonprofits be more efficient and effective at solving problems at the local community level. I will add my gratitude to the video below from Google. Dijon Marketing connects good people to people doing good. But I couldn’t do that nearly as effectively without the generous tools provided by Google.

Join in the spirit of GivingTuesday 2020

  • November 28, 2020

This Tuesday, December 1, 2020 is GivingTuesday. Started in 2012, GivingTuesday has grown to become a global day encouraging generosity. That can include anything from going out of your way say hi to a neighbor to making financial contributions to nonprofit organizations helping out in your community.

GivingTuesday Logo

It is especially poignant this year when so many are in need due to the coronavirus pandemic. If you are looking for individuals or organizations in your community that could use either volunteer or monetary donations, a good place to start is by searching for #GivingTuesday. Most will have some social media posts in the next few days asking for your help.

Ways to participate in GivingTuesday

  • Volunteer your time to assist a local organization either on site or remotely. It’s likely you have a skill set that could be useful, even if it’s not directly on the front lines.
  • Amplify the message of a nonprofit whose values you share. Add a link to their homepage, retweet their latest post, or shout them out in an Instagram story.
  • Donate needed items. That could be canned goods for a food drive, knitting scarves for a clothing drive, or fulfilling an Amazon wish list.
  • Make a monetary donation. Just about every nonprofit is hurting this year from a lack of fundraising events and opportunities. Making a one-time or recurring donation can help them keep their mission alive.
  • Spread kindness. Perform random acts of kindness for friends, family, or complete strangers. You never know how your simple act could transform the day for the recipient.

To learn more about this global day of selflessness or to find a local or issue-based participant, visit the official Giving Tuesday website.

How to maintain a blog long term

  • October 6, 2020

Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. Many well intended authors set up a blog, feverishly post to it for a few weeks or months, and then abandon it altogether. The main purpose of a blog (like on this website) is to keep fresh content and ideas, and to expand the footprint of an otherwise small website. Additional thought leadership pieces can introduce new keywords and bring new audiences to your page. Finding a stagnant blog that has gone 2 years without a new post, however, can do just as much harm as a maintained blog can do good.

The important thing is to post regularly. But “regularly” just means … regularly. Not often. Not daily. I post on this blog every 18 days, give or take. That gives me time to think of new topics. It gives me a little break between blogs. And it is not too taxing. The reason I chose this topic for today is that it is now the 3 year anniversary of posting every 18 days. Obviously, it has been quite sustainable.

Tips for keeping a blog going

  1. Set a cadence you can easily maintain. Even if you have a ton of ideas right now, there will come a day that the well runs dry. You want to give yourself ample time to discover new topics.
  2. Don’t post every idea all at once. If you have 50 great ideas for blogs, congrats! That means you have 50 or 100 weeks of content queued up. Having a backlog of great topics you can’t wait to write about is a good thing. Don’t squander it too quickly.
  3. Maintain an editorial calendar. Posting regularly doesn’t have to be quite as strict as my every-18-day rule. But it should be spaced somewhat evenly. Don’t do 3 blogs today and then none for 5 months.
  4. Keep a backlog of topics. When you think of the next great topic, add it to the list. Then when it’s time to write your next blog, you can review that list and pick your favorite or most timely.
  5. Write. Don’t wait for inspiration. Don’t hope you feel like it tomorrow. Be disciplined. The hardest part to writing is getting start. So sit down, and write.
  6. Don’t obsess. This is blog content. Get your idea across. Inspire some thoughts, then move on to the next. It doesn’t have to be perfect and you can always edit it later if you need to.

I’ve seen far too many blogs putter out and die after far too short of a time. Following these few helpful hints should help you extend your influence out over several years, increasing your footprint, benefiting SEO, and representing your brand!

North Texas Giving Day 2020

  • September 17, 2020

Today is North Texas Giving Day – an 18-hour long fundraising push for nonprofits in the North Texas area. Over 3300 different nonprofits have registered with the organization to receive donations through this event and their website. You can search by county, city, cause area, demographics served, organization size, and more.

Visit NorthTexasGivingDay.org to search and pledge donations directly to the causes that resonate the most with you. Especially during the pandemic, a lot of nonprofits have seen an increased need. Unfortunately, that has coincided with a decrease in their typical revenue streams. This virtual event is a great way to revitalize organizations. Your dollars go directly to those doing the most impactful work on the ground in your community.

LastPass Unveils updated Security Dashboard

  • August 13, 2020

LastPass, one of the top password management providers, has given their Security Dashboard a face lift! With this handy tool, you can prioritize maintenance of your passwords and eliminate weak, old, or repeated passwords. The new Security Dashboard is available from a link in the left-hand navigation of your LastPass Vault. It integrates much better into the vault than the previous password checker.

Security score

First, you’ll see an overview of your Security Score from 0-100%. To receive a perfect score:

  • Enable Multifactor Authentication
  • Disable offline access
  • Restrict devices
  • 50 passwords with no old, repeated, or weak

Click on “View passwords” to see an individual evaluation for each. They are grouped into categories requiring attention. You can then filter to focus on Weak, Missing, Reused, or Old. Many larger, popular sites will have an option to auto-update your password. No effort for you! Others may require you to navigate to the site and manually go through their password update process.

Dark web monitoring

Another great feature available is dark web monitoring. Sounds spooky and cybernetic. Really, it just means that any of the email addresses associated with your accounts are added to a monitored list. Any high profile breaches or leaked data will be checked to see if you have been impacted. Most of the time, encrypted data ensures your plain text password remains safe. However, even hashed passwords can sometimes be reverse engineered if they are common or weak. With dark web monitoring, you can change the potentially compromised password immediately (and upgrade it if needed).

Give the new LastPass Security Dashboard a spin. If you haven’t implemented any password management in your life, maybe this is a good time to try their product absolutely free. You’ll see all the benefits a well organized and managed password list can bring!

Yoast Readability Score

  • July 26, 2020

The Yoast WordPress Plugin is most known as the most popular SEO tool. But don’t overlook the Readability Score tool included with it. It will make your content easier to read, and could thus indirectly improve the SEO by increasing the number of shares or the time each visitor spends on your site consuming that content.

Readability aspects Yoast checks

  • Subheading distribution. See above. I sectioned off my list of checks with a subheading. That helps you key in faster on the info you want.
  • Flesch Reading Ease. This is a score between 0 and 100 that predicts how easy your content is to read. It looks at both sentence length and also how many polysyllabic words you use. (Using that word is going to hurt my score.)
  • Passive voice. This one is the hardest for me and makes the biggest improvement in my writing when I pay attention to it. “Limiting passive voice can make an improvement in your writing,” sounds better if you say, “Limiting passive voice improves your writing.”
  • Sentence length. Chopping up long, complicated sentences makes consumption faster and easier. If you are targeting a global audience, it is also generally better Global English and makes machine translation more accurate.
  • Paragraph length. Same as dividing up your sentences, giant monolithic blobs of text are hard on the eyes. A few line breaks can help people skim your content and find what they’re looking for more easily.
  • Transition words. I get docked for this one often because I’m not writing narratives. I am often listing technical aspects and don’t use a lot of flourishes like “therefore,” “hence,” or “thus.” Sometimes I ignore this suggestion.
  • Consecutive sentences. If I write like this. If I use repetition. If I don’t vary my sentence structure. If I flagrantly violate the rules. Then you can see why consecutive sentences is a check.

Yoast Readability Score Screenshot

As you type, your readability score will automatically update. You may notice that as you correct one issue, another pops up. Perhaps when you divided that sentence into two, you used passive voice without a transition.

The first time I paid attention to my readability score, I thought it wasn’t helpful. How can automated rules improve my writing. But over time, I’ve come to find it a handy tool. The end result of my articles are often much improved from the first draft just by improving my readability score. Check out the Yoast SEO Plugin if you haven’t before and start taking advantage of the Readability Scores on your website!

Using Permalinks in WordPress

  • July 8, 2020

A permalink is exactly what the portmanteau suggests – a permanent link. All WordPress content, whether it’s a post or a page, has a permalink. That lets you easily create internal links and to build a backlink portfolio for SEO. But there are a few tips for making the best use of permalinks.

WordPress General Settings for Posts

Each new post can be assigned a permalink in a few different ways. Navigate to Settings > Permalinks from the main WordPress menu. There you will see options for:

  • Plain /?p=123 (bad choice)
  • Day and name /2020/20/08/sample-post/
  • Month and name /2020/08/sample-post/
  • Numeric /archives/123 (bad choice)
  • Post name /sample-post/
  • Custom Structure

You’ll notice I’ve marked anything that uses numbers to represent your blog posts as a bad choice. The URL can be configured to contain keywords that you want to rank for. Giving up the opportunity to add keywords to your URL is a mistake. Be sure you’ve selected one that uses the post name. On my blog, I use a custom structure of /blog/%postname%/.

Edit a Permalink

In both a post and a page, the Document Settings > Permalink will allow you to edit the permalink after it’s been generated. It will default to the post or page name, forced to lowercase, and separated by dashes. For example: using-permalinks-in-wordpress. If you want to change that, you can do it from the URL Slug under Permalink Document Settings.

Just be careful that you either create a 301 permanent redirect or that you’ve set up your redirect plugin to automatically create redirects when you change a URL Slug. If it’s a brand new piece of content there’s no risk, but if it’s been indexed by Google or linked to by someone else, those links will break when the permalink changes.

Just a few easy settings, and little bit of forethought will have you with attractive, easy to read, high CTR links in Google results!

Volunteer Management System Features

  • June 20, 2020

Almost every nonprofit charity lives and dies by its volunteers. As your organization grows, eventually you are going to need to find a way to manage those volunteers. If you find yourself overwhelmed with the task, that’s a great problem to have! Online volunteer management systems, like Volgistics or BetterImpact, come with a host of features to make the life of a coordinator easier.

Reasons to have a volunteer management system

  1. Maintain a single source of truth for volunteer contact information and availability that users can update themselves as needed
  2. Use a centralized communication platform. Your message arrives in print, email, or text format at the preferred recipient address.
  3. Empower volunteers to self-schedule. They can view available time slots, assign or remove themselves, and free you from the task
  4. Recognize, reward, and celebrate milestones in volunteering

After you’ve implemented a volunteer management system, it frees you up for more important tasks. Let volunteers manage their own data and scheduling. You can set up a sign-in kiosk or just auto-crediting hours to individuals. Then you can gamify things like adding badges to name tags or sending out birthday or hour-milestone emails automatically. The benefits of an online, secure, self-service portal definitely justify the cost, so take a look at some options today!

Don’t cross-post on social media platforms

  • April 27, 2020

If you are maintaining multiple social media profiles, it can be enticing to cross-post the exact same message on all at once. And certain social media management tools even explicitly allow/encourage this. But cross-posting can hurt the effectiveness of your social campaigns for a number of reasons.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t post the same message or content, it just needs to be tweaked to perform optimally on each network and avoid errors or follower confusion.

Things to make unique for each platform

  1. Post times. The optimal time to post on each network varies based on the network and your audience. You can use some statistical averages, or use your own analytics and insights to determine the optimal time of day to reach your audience, but chances are it will vary by platform.
  2. @ Mentions. Depending on which other profiles you are tagging or mentioning, the syntax may vary per network. That organization’s usernames may also vary. Or they may not participate in all the same social networks you do. Make sure to customize your @ mentions of other profiles for the network you’re on.
  3. #Hashtags. Hashtag best practices vary by network as well. Whereas Twitter and Instagram rely on them heavily, Facebook was late to the game and they were not intrinsic to the platform. Overuse of hashtags can actually hurt your organic reach on Facebook.
  4. Message length. Twitter is definitely the limiting factor on this one. You don’t necessarily want to cut your captions or messages to Twitter-length on all platforms, so customizing for the allowable length makes sense.
  5. Photo/video aspect ratio. The best sizes and aspect ratios to get the optimal cropping on preview varies by platform. Understand the best size for images and you’ll get better engagement as users scroll past your content. In general, Instagram is the only 1×1 square content.

With minimal extra effort you can take a single message or post and tweak it slightly. That way you can take advantage of the features of each social media platform. And your content can perform optimally on each.