One of the most powerful ways of leveraging search terms within your website copy is by using anchor text. What is anchor text you ask?
Anchor text is the words that link through to a webpage from another webpage. The more common uses of anchor text are “click here” “download now” and “Contact Us”.
Anchor text can be used to help boost your web pages search engine ranking for certain keywords i.e. if you have a florist website it advantageous to link to the website and pages using anchor text such as “On Line Florist” or “Buy Flowers”. Linking to pages in this manner can help increase your websites presence in SERP’s for the above terms.
Another good example is AddMe.com. More often than not you will see links across the web that point to www.AddMe.com, the most common anchor text used will be “Search Engine Submission” , this is one of the reasons why AddMe is popular for the term Search Engine Submission.
Still does not make sense? Ok, try this – SEO and Anchor text is a two-stage kudos thing:
1. When one website links to another site it’s seen as a “vote in popularity” thus the site is “good”.
2.Depending on HOW sites link to each other dictates how each site performs in a search engine. Using the above example, the more sites that link at AddMe using the term “Search Engine Submission” the better AddMe.com performs for the term “Search Engine Submission”.
Anchor Text SEO Juice
The most effective example of anchor text effecting SERPS would be the Adobe website. To give you an example of how powerful anchor text can be when used in SEO try the following:
Do a search in Google for “Click Here”, the first website that appears in the results should be Adobe.
Now look at the page Google returns, there is no instance of the words “click here” on the adobe page, thus the search engine is clearly using anchor text from other websites to return adobe.com.
How often have you clicked on the link like this: “Click here to download adobe reader” etc.
Now that’s Anchor Text SEO Power!
Anchor Text Formatting
Below is a simple example of how to correctly format anchor text
<a href=”http://www.addme.com/”>Search Engine Submission</a>
Between the quotes is where you would put the web address. Between > and </a> is where you would put the description of your link, in this case Search Engine Submission.
Choosing and Using Anchor Text
Based on the examples above anchor text is clearly a very powerful tool for SEO so choosing the correct text is key to your websites performance in search engines.
Some Anchor Points:
- Use a keyword research tool to pick the popular words
- Use phrases in the anchor text, not a single word
- Include multiple links with anchor text per page
- Include links within the body of the content
- Focus on two to three anchor text terms
My Anchor Text Conclusion
If you’re not already doing so, start including anchor text into your SEO campaigns, done correctly and you can quickly climb to the top of the search heap and receive the search traffic you deserve.
Use anchor text in all your on page copy and any other copy and articles you may write for publishing on other websites, finally ask people to link back to you using specific anchor text, not just “click here”.
text from other websites to return adobe.com.
How often have you clicked on the link like this: “Click here to download adobe reader” etc.
Now that’s Anchor Text SEO Power!