How Anchor Text Can Make Or Break You
Some of you will remember the day when you could Google “miserable failure” and be taken to the White House website bio of President George W. Bush. It’s called Google Bombing and it was all too real, and worked like a charm. Web pages were ranking for keywords that didn’t even appear on the page itself. All because of the anchor text of the links pointing in.
Anchor text is the text that is used within a hyperlink from one page to another. The best way to link from Page A to Page B is to use the primary keyword that appears on Page B as your anchor text. That anchor text goes a long way to ensuring that you rank highly for your important keywords and for webmasters who have performed link building campaigns around effective anchor text, they’ve been able to see great results, many times taking pages buried deep within the SERPs all the way to page 1. Anchor text is one of the most powerful tools in your search engine optimization arsenal.
While Google Bombing may have worked for awhile, the best anchor text has always been the use of keywords that already appear on a web page. It is possible to rank a web page for two or three important keywords or phrases just by performing that many link building campaigns focusing on separate but equal anchor text phrases. It takes planning, but your anchor text can improve your search rankings tremendously.
8 Responses to “How Anchor Text Can Make Or Break You”
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Agreed Nick! Anchor text is and has been a powerful component of link building and can greatly influence ranking. Marketers and those executing SEO need to be careful with anchor text so that it doesn’t appear artificial and abused. Diversifying the anchor text to a primary landing page is important as is diversifying link types and partners. There is growing sentiment that the strength of anchor text will start declining due to the ability for exploitation but that should not deter anyone from leveraging this powerful technique. If one examines their backlinks through Yahoo Site Explorer while using some of the nifty WordPress plug-ins, they can quickly assess how diverse their anchor text is. This is also accessible through Google Webmaster Tools. An in-house audit or outsourced seo site audit should help identify weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and threats as it relates to diversified anchor text & link building.
Great reminder to us all, Nick. It’s also worth remembering that we are not talking just about linking to home pages. We need to to deep link to other pages and cross link within a site too.
You are very correct Nick. If the words or word string, or better yet, the exact phrase does not appear on the page then the page will not rank for the phrase used in the link text.
We have tested this a number of ways in social media and you are exactly correct. However there are a number of ways to change what appears on a page today.
You have been reading my stuff for a while now, can you guess how I could alter a page the I do not own? In fact I have done it a number of times.
Oh, look I am doing it now……
But what about varying anchor text? This is something i always do to try and make the linking look natural. I occasionally add a full url link (if you’ve properly optimised your page names and architecture then this should have keywords in it).
Matt, yes. For sure you want to vary your anchor text.
Re: Matt & Nick
And statistically that should also include some of the infamous “CLICK HERE”s.
James Mangosteen Dean
[...] and importance of inbound link anchor text. That’s why we’ve devoted so much time to the topic on this blog. But there is more to inbound linking than the choice of your anchor text. That is [...]
Anchor is very important for improve rank and good information for improve my blog