By Jagdeep. S. Pannu
If you have done some serious reading about your website's optimization,
you probably would have come across the reference to the phrase
“optimization of anchor text”. This article discusses the definition and
importance of anchor text and how you can use this powerful website
optimization feature to get high ranking in search engines.
What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. Let's take this
example:
Please examine our SEO case studies for validation to evaluate our href="http://www.seorank.com/">search
engine optimization capabilities.
Here the words “SEO Case Studies” and “Search Engine Optimization” are
hyper linked to the hidden URLs http://www.seorank.com/seo-casestudies.htm
and http://www.seorank.com respectively. The words within the visible
links, “SEO Case studies” and “Search Engine Optimization”, are called
the anchor text.
In a normally built site, anchor text is usually used to indicate the
subject matter of the page that it links to. For example, the text HREF="http://www.seorank.com/seo-casestudies.htm">SEO
case studies indicates to visitors that they can expect to see content
about case studies pertaining to SEO if they visit the link. This
pattern of usage has been applied in search engine algorithms to enhance
the relevance of the “target” or the “landing page” URL for the keywords
appearing within the anchor text.
Anchor Text Enhances the Relevance of the Target Page
Please note that 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 like 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 a special operator: ‘allinanchor:keyword’, which
picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. This
further implies that Google’s algorithm is configured to index anchor
text as separate queryable data, thereby making it evident, that Google
considers it an important pointer to page relevance. 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
hyperlinking structures to make use of optimized anchor text. When
linking to internal pages, it is better to hyperlink relevant keywords
instead of linking unrelated common words. A common lapse is the
hyperlinking of the common words like "here" instead of content related
keywords. For example in the sentence:
"Read all about Anchor Text here", the tendency is to link "here" to the
anchor text content URL whereas the best way is to link " Anchor Text ".
This is important because you can leverage the hyperlinking of important
keyword phrases instead of hyperlinking unrelated text wherever
possible. For delivering relevant results, robots are hungry for anchor
text so it is always a great idea to hyperlink important keywords to
help search engines deliver relevance. Always restructure sentences if
keywords don’t fit in anchor text.
Using Keywords in Natural Text to Create Anchor Text
You can also locate (or insert) important keyword phrases in your page’s
natural text and link it to relevant target pages of your site. Consider
the paragraph below. Notice how the highly relevant keywords (
underlined )can be converted into powerful anchor text. Each keyword
phrase links to an important relevant section of the same site.
Search engine optimization is an important part of any search engine
marketing initiative. Some people believe that submitting the site to
search engines alone is sufficient in getting a top-10 ranking. This is
not true. Search engine submission only announces your site's existence
to search engines. To get a good href="http://www.seorank.com/">search
engine ranking, it is important that you carry out title tag
optimization, href="http://www.seorank.com/meta-tags-article.htm">meta
tags optimization and anchor text optimization of your website amongst
other SEO techniques.
While the above example seems like overkill, this is just to illustrate
how you can accommodate your important keyword phrases by carefully
rewording the text of your web pages. If you feel that the standard blue
underlined hyperlinks appear ugly on your website, then you can
re-format its HTML markup code to change color of the text and get rid
of the underline without losing the power of the 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.
When soliciting external links, it is better to provide your own “cut
and paste” HTML code. Webmasters like it when a ready to paste HTML code
is available for them to use, to provide a link to your website.
Consider the following examples:
Website Promotion & Search Engine Optimization
SEO Rank provides Website promotion and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
services for small websites to large e-commerce sites requiring Search
Engine Optimization & Ranking
http://www.seorank.com/seo-programs.htm
Search Engine Copywriting Tips & Techniques
Search Engine Copywriting services at SEORank - offering Search Engine
Copywriting tips and copywriting techniques for creating your Search
Engine Friendly copy.
http://www.seorank.com/seo-copywriting-article.htm
Notice how not only each of the title anchor text is optimized to
contain important keyword phrases, but also that the description text
varies to accommodate more keyword variation. Also, note that each
variation has a different landing page URL to boost the relevance of
your site’s individual pages depending upon the theme of that page.
Links from external sites help your site to gain relevance for keywords
mentioned in the anchor text which boosts your site’s ranking. As the
number of such inbound links increase, so will your site’s ranking in
SERPs.
Anchor text therefore comes on top of the checklist in your SEO
initiatives.
Article last updated: April 02 2004
Related Reading:
Meta Tag Optimization
Title and Meta Description Tag Optimization
About the author: Jagdeep.S. Pannu is Manager, Online Marketing, at HREF="http://www.seorank.com/">SEORank,
a leading HREF="http://www.seorank.com/">Search engine optimization
services company.
(c) Copyright 2004 Jagdeep.S. Pannu, SEORank
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