What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the text that you see in the hyperlink on the webpage. Let's take this example:
For expert advice on
A.
Australian Search Engine Optimization go to
B. http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
If you click on
A.
Australian Search Engine Optimization or
B. http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au you will come our site using either link.
The big difference being is that if you use method A you are giving a vote to the search engines for those keywords. The keywords I've used “Australian search engine optimization” are called the anchor text.
Anchor Text Enhances the Relevance of the Target Page
The keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertaining to the keywords used. While the relevance of the page containing the anchor text is also enhanced to some degree (because of relevant keywords appearing on that page), the real gainer is the target page URL. Use this knowledge to build the relevance of each page of your site, through optimized anchor text containing important keywords, relevant to the theme of such pages, from other pages of your site.
Search Engine Algorithms LOVE Anchor Text
The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. All search engines that matter, give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages. In fact Google even has an advanced operator: ‘allinanchor:keyword', which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages.
Now why do you think that they would bother with something like that? Maybe because it is a key factor in ranking websites by Google and other search engines?
Our internal research leads us to believe that weight given to anchor text has been raised recently in the Google algorithm. With these changes, it is possible to enhance your website's ranking by using the right keywords in anchor text.
It has also been studied that anchor text, whether from external, or internal pages, is important. It should therefore be ensured that significant attention is given to the inclusion of important keywords in your anchor text.
How to Optimize Anchor Text Within Your Site
Anchor text optimization can be deployed throughout your site to enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content. You would be surprised, how easy it is, to find suitable instances of hyper-linking structures to make use of optimized anchor text.
When linking to internal pages, it is better to use the format:
"Read all about
Australian Search Engine Optimization" Instead of: "Read all about Australian search engine optimization
here"
Or, as is commonly seen, "
Click Here" for information on Australian Search Engine Optimization –
-unless, of course you would like to ranked highly for the keyword “click here” :-)
The above example shows us that you can leverage the hyper-linking of important keyword phrases instead of hyper-linking unrelated text wherever possible. It is always a great idea to restructure sentences if keywords don't fit in anchor text.
Optimizing Anchor Text of External Links
Keywords within the anchor text are equally useful from links pointing to your website. If you are pursuing or considering a link building campaign, put some serious thought in writing multiple options of the title and description of the link pointing to your website.
The "title" which is usually used as the hyper-linked text, should contain your important keywords. It is good to work with ten different options of title and description as it not only gives you more room to play with several keywords, but it also helps search engines give you a wider keyword coverage.
Bruce Gow specialises in search engine optimisation,
internet marketing & search engine optimisation.
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For a free report on search engine marketing of your website, visit http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
