Using Jump Link WordPress Code to Enhance Your SEO: [Bonus Link Juice]

What are Jump Link Codes or Anchor Links

A great user experience is one of the fundamentals to having a low bounce rate on your website. If you don’t know what that is, a high bounce rate is when visitors immediately leave your site within a few seconds. Adding jump link WordPress code to labels at the top of your page can really help with this.

Here’s what I mean by adding jump links and how they can be implemented. Below is a list of titles that I have jump links (or anchor links) embedded. You can simply click on these to drop down to the section that interests you.

• How Can Jump Links Benefit Your Website
• How To Implement Jump Link Code – Step 1
• How To Implement Jump Link Code – Step 2
• How To Implement Jump Link Code – Step 3
• How To Implement Jump Link Code – Step 4
• Wrapping Up

All the above links have a small amount of code associated to them which directs the user to the titled section down the page. These links, along with a keyword research strategy are crucial to your website rankings.

How Can Jump Links Benefit Your Website

The backbone of any well ranked website comes down to 2 main factors. The first being a well researched keyword strategy, which requires a keyword tool to source the best keywords for your written articles.

The second is the use of links throughout your whole website, especially internal and external links. Although external links should only be directed to websites with authority, otherwise they can harm your website.

Backlinks are also a major factor which largely come from social media sites when you post your articles. Even better when others see your social posting and they share it around.

So, what about this little known anchor link strategy. Can this really help with ranking your post and boosting it that bit more. Absolutely it can.

You’ll find that visitors will begin to stay on your site longer than if you just display slabs of content. Most people these days don’t have time to read full articles so they browse your site looking for the answers to their issues. If they have a link that can direct them straight to their answer, they’ll appreciate this and immediately find what they’re looking for.

There’s a good chance also that if these visitors like the layout of your site, and you’ve made it easy for them to navigate, they will probably return to see what other great information you can offer them.

The fact that your navigation becomes so much easier, means visitors will stay longer and reduce your bounce rate I mentioned earlier. And the longer your audience stays on your website, the higher ranking you’ll gain as this is a big SEO ranking factor.

These jump to anchor links will allow Googlebot to crawl extra linkage and therefore helps with indexing.

So, be sure to implement this strategy, especially for longer posts where it can be a little difficult for a user to find the exact information they’re searching for. It can only help your website ranking and possibly give you that extra boost required if your rankings are not as high as you’d like.

How to Implement Jump Link Code

When I first implemented this approach, I missed a crucial element which obviously made the links not work. Make sure you copy the exact code, as leaving out a hyphen will break the code and your relationship to the link will not work.

It’s a fairly easy 2 part implementation which, if you follow these instructions, will work well. So, let’s get going.

Step 1

Firstly, you want to work out exactly which label, you want to link, to which content section. As for this page, let’s use the second label as an example. It will link to this first step in the process.

At this point, the labels are simple text with no link. Once a link has been attached, the label will show as red (this color is set in my theme customizer settings) and you’ll notice your mouse will change to a clickable hand icon. Your links will probably be a different color, often blue is a popular default color for clickable links.

Step 2

This doesn’t really matter in terms of order so do as you please. This means you can reverse steps 2 & 3. I generally add my link ID to the content section first, like this.

The code you need to add is:

id=“example-example”

Scroll down and find the title that you’d like to add your link to. In this example I’m looking for “Step1”.

Now, don’t worry if you are scared of code, this is simple. Click over to your HTML editor, this is where you need to add the code. Scroll down until you see <h3>Step 1</h3> (or whatever title you have in place of Step 1). These are your heading tags. You are going to add the anchor code to the opening heading tag. So your HTML should look like this:

< h3 id=“step-1” Step 1</h3>

Okay, that’s Step 2 complete.

Step 3

Now you’re simply going to add a link to your label text. This is done just as you would for an internal or external link.

All you need to do, is highlight your label, in my case it’s “How To Implement Jump Link Code – Step 1” and click the link button in your text editor bar. A link field will appear for you to place the link id into.

There’s one difference however. A hashtag needs to be placed at the beginning of the link field. So, the link should look like this:

#step-1

That’s it. Once you save your post it will update the link code and your label should now at like a link. As mentioned earlier, the color of my link has changed to red, yours may have changed to an alternate color.

Just to make a further point, you can probably see that the whole title is not required to create a link. The example title I used here is ” How To Implement Jump Link Code – Step 1′, yet to link the title I’ve only used “step-1” as the link code. You can use the whole title if it suits you, but using less words may make things easier.

Step 4

You now need to test that is all works correctly. Click on any links you’ve created and make sure they link to the intended destination. If they do, great. If not, you’ve probably missed a hyphen or inverted commas along the way.

Also make sure the hashtag # is included at the beginning of your link. If you’re still having trouble, watch the video I’ve created which appears on this page. Alternatively, leave a message in the comments and I’ll get back to you.

Wrapping Up

SEO is going to be your launchpad to the success of your long term business, and these jump to links are only going to help boost your efforts to the top pages in Google and other search engines. There are many other aspects that also come into play, such as keyword research as I’ve already mentioned. You also want a great SEO plugin which can help with your rankings and indexing.

The layout becomes much easier on the eye when you create links like this also. There’s no need to use them on each and every post though. Sometimes you may write an article that is only 700-800 words long. This probably doesn’t require these sort of links. It’s when you get well over 1000 words that you may think about implementing this strategy. This is one of the best affiliate marketing techniques for beginners or advanced bloggers.

I hope this helps you out with how jump links are created. If you have anything to add, I’d be happy to hear from you. Just make a comment in the discussion section below.