What is link anchor text?

Computers & TechnologyRSS / Link Popularity

  • Author Neel Alfred
  • Published March 25, 2010
  • Word count 543

By anchor text, we are talking about the text of your link, some links have the web address as the text, but some links have actual words that are linked. The later ones, are the ones that you are after. We know that it is easiest to go out there and start building as many back links as you can and use the same text over and over, however this is not the preferred method of Google's to rank you so, Mix It Up!

You can say that more powerful link anchor text than the site title would be a better choice, at least use of the company name points those pages out clearly for the site visitor. If the company name includes a targeted keyword, some added search engine benefit is included as well. In any case, the better link anchor text will assist in maintaining the overall site theme. Note that the footer anchor text places some extra keyword density on the page.

Another tip to vary anchor text is to point links to your internal web pages using different keywords and different anchor text. The goal is to get more links and to help your internal web pages to rank well. The search engines will considered that links are natural and pointing to your.

Google's Webmaster Tools facilitate this optimization by letting website owners view the most common words in anchor text linking to their site. The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. In fact Google even has a special operator: allinanchor:keyword', which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. Google/Yahoo bombing is the practice of placing terms you want a given page to rank for in anchor text that links to that page.

An infamous, large-scale example of this same test involved the phrase "miserable failure." Some enterprising bloggers got together a few years ago and decided to link lots of sites to the official biography page for President George W. Bush at the whitehouse.gov site. The goal, of course, was to make that page show up in the #1 position whenever unsuspecting (or in this case, many suspecting) searchers typed in that phrase. It worked.

Make sure all the pages within your web site link to each other. Create a site map that lists all the web pages. Use anchor text in the description of your link. When Google visits your site it can easily spider your whole site using the site map.It's difficult to get good rankings from blog posts because they typically don't contain backlinks. You can remedy this by linking the keywords (anchor text) in related posts to the page you want to get good rankings for.

Another practical measure is to vary the target webpage by linking a specific page to a given article. In other words, don not solely use your root domain as the target site. For instance use hyperlinked text from an Ezine article or other non-video directory to route readers to the specific video-containing post (e.g. at domain.com/video-about-article) that accompanies the text. Your readers will surely recognize the extra care given to your linking.

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