What Are The Functions Of Anchor Text In SEO
Probably one of the most important elements of keyword use is in anchor text. Anchor text is text found on a given web site that appears to be a hyperlink. Figure 6-4 illustrates how anchor text appears on a page.
Chances are, you see anchor text every day. In fact, anchor text has become such a major inclusion on web pages that companies often use it without any thought as to how it could affect their search engine rankings.
How you use anchor text does matter, however, because anchor text is one of the most important search engine ranking factors. When a search engine looks at your web page, it automatically fol- lows all the links that you have on the page. If those links (or even a large portion of those links) are text-based links, that’s even better, because then what the search engine sees is not just the link to another page, but also your keywords. It’s not enough just to make all your links text-based, however. There’s a fine science to taking advantage of the power of anchor text.
The first thing you should understand is that there are two kinds of anchor texts: yours and everyone else’s. I’m not being facetious here. It really is important that you consider not only how you link with other people, but also how they will link back to you. For example, if you do a Google search for the term “click,” you’ll find that the Apple QuickTime web site is at the very top of the list. This isn’t because Apple loaded down the QuickTime site with the keyword “click.” What’s actually hap- pened is that many people link to QuickTime using the word “click” in their anchor text. This isn’t hard to believe, because most web sites that use the QuickTime application usually include a text link to “Click here to download” or something similar. As you can see, it’s not just your own anchor text that matters. How your site is included in others’ anchor text is also important.
We’ll come back to how other people link to you. For now, let’s consider how you use anchor text in your web site. As we’ve already established, anchor text is the linked text on your web site. This text can be linked either to other pages within your own web site, or it can be linked to others’ web sites that are relevant to the content of your site. And that’s the real key to how anchor text can be so powerful- the relevance of the link and the words used to create the link.
When a search engine crawls your site, it’s looking at several different factors- the topic of the site as indicated by the words used in the text, the links leading away from the site, and the links leading into the site. Of course, these aren’t the only factors that matter, but they’re among the top-ranking factors, because how these elements are handled determines how user-friendly (and authentic) your site is. So if your site caters to gourmet cooks, the information on your site might include articles about gourmet techniques, gourmet recipes, and links to web sites where site visitors can purchase gourmet ingredients or tools.
When the crawler examines your site, it’s going to see that the topic of the site is gourmet cooking (which will be determined by the keywords you use in the site text). Then it’s going to follow all the links on your site. If those links happen to be text-based links that use your keywords, and they lead to web sites that are relevant to the topic of your site, you’re going to score well with the search engine crawler. The result is that you’ll appear higher in SERPs than you would if you didn’t have relevant keywords in your text and links.
You should use care when creating anchor text links, however. If you use the wrong words, you won’t get nearly the mileage that you need from the links. One mistake some web-site owners make is to create web pages with the anchor text “click here.” That phrase is in no way related to the content of the site, so when a crawler examines the anchor text, it doesn’t see relevant keywords, even if the links are relevant to web sites that are relevant to the content of the site. Think of your anchor text as a chance to showcase the relationships you have with related companies.
What works best is to use as many of the keywords as you can from the list of relevant keywords that you developed during the planning process. Going back to our gourmet cooking example, if you use an anchor text link that reads Gourmet Ingredients and links to a web site that sells gourmet foods, a search engines sees your key phrase (Gourmet Ingredients) and it sees a link that leads to a web site that sells gourmet ingredients. So for the effort of creating that small piece of anchor text, you not only have a valid reason to use your keywords and phrases, but you also have a link that leads to a relevant web site.
So if you’re adding the anchor text for Gourmet Ingredients to your web page, you must add a piece of HTML like this in each spot where you want the anchor text to appear:
<a href=”http://www.gourmet ingredientslink.com”>Gourmet Ingredients</a>
Then, on your web site, what the user sees is shown in Figure 6-5.
One more strategy for anchor text that you should consideris varying the anchor text. When you repeat the same anchor text over and overagain on a given web page, it begins to lose its effective- ness, and in fact can cause a search engine crawler to rank your site lower in the SERPs. It’s much more effective to use multiple keywords and phrases as anchor text on a web page. This allows you to vary the anchor text, but to maintain a consistency in the keywords and phrases you use.
The other type of anchor text is that which others use to link back to your site. Many times, this anchor text is overlooked as an SEO strategy; however, it’s one of the most effective types of opti- mization that you can use. Here’s an example: One savvy marketer on the Internet decided to see how quickly he could make his site rank high in the Google SERPs. So he used anchor text links on his page, and then solicited reciprocal links, based on highly targeted keywords and phrases that were relevant to his site. The result was that within four days, the web site had shot to the number four position in the Google SERPs.
There are two elements to consider in this story. The first is that the web-site owner sought recipro- cal links. These are links to your page from another web site, in return for your site linking to them. The reciprocal links are most effective when they come from sites that are relevant to your web site. But most often, you’ll have to seek the links out.
Furthermore, in order to take advantage of all the value of reciprocal links, you also need to ensure that your site is linked to in a certain way. Instead of having another site just link to your main page, it’s most effective toprovide a potential linking site with the code that includes the anchor text you want to use.
The second element of the story, to which you should pay special attention, is that the links used by the webmaster were highly targeted keywords. In order to learn which keywords will be most effective for yoursite, you should refer to your keyword research. The keywords that are searched for most often, but are as narrowly related to your site as possible, are the keywords that you should consider using in your anchor text. The whole point of anchor text is to optimize your site to gain higher search engine rankings, which in turn brings visitors to your site.
So how often should you use anchor text on a web page?That’s one of those magic numbers that no one really knows for sure. Different people will tell you different things. Some say no more than two or threetimes, others say no less than 10 or 12 times. A good rule of thumb is to use anchor text as many times as there is a solid reason to use it. Don’t load your content with anchor text just to have the links, but if you have a relevant link that can be included, don’t skip it just because you’ve used anchor text five other times on the page.
Determining what anchor text is essential and what isn’t is a personal decision. However, if you’re using a good analytics program that tracks the links on your web pages, you should be able to deter- mine whichanchor text links are most effective and how using them on a page affects your normal traffic flow. Anchor text is a good way to improve your search engine ranking, but as you’ve seen many times before in this book, your web pages should be designed with the user in mind.
One more note about anchor text before moving on. One of the most effective ways to use anchor text is in dynamic content. Dynamic content is content that changes regularly. Most often, that means blogs. Anchor text is well suited to blogs that change daily or weekly. This is fresh content (which is also a plus for improving your search engine rankings). It gives you an opportunity to change your anchor text regularly. Search engine crawlers get bored, too, and if you can provide them with dynamic content that contains relevant anchor text, those crawlers will look on you with favor.
CAUTION
One anchor-text tactic to avoid is Google bombing (or link bombing). Google bombing refers to the methods used by black-hat SEOs to artificially inflate their web-site ranking by connecting an unrelated keyword to a specific web site. For Google bombing to work, more than one web-site designer must be willing to participate in a link exchange that will then grow exponen- tially because of the “apparent” popularity of the site.
For example, if in September 2006 a user searched for the phrase “miserable failure,” that user was taken to the George W. Bush web site. A group of web-site designers got together and all of them used the anchor text “miserable failure” to link to Bush’s web site, pushing far more traffic to the site than would otherwise have gone there.
Usually, Google bombing is politically related, though it is not exclusively political. And Google bombs aren’t limited to the Google search engine. Any search engine can be affected by Google bombing, which is also sometimes called link bombing.
