Anchor
Text
The
importance of anchor text for search engine ranking.
Anchor
text is the name given to the text within a hyperlink. For
example:
Affiliate
School - how to make money on the internet.
In
this example 'Affiliate School' is the anchor text. The reason
anchor text is important is because major search engines use
the anchor text when ranking your webpage (and website) for
particular search terms or 'key phrases'.
If
your website is about badminton rackets, and your main targeted
keyphrase for your index page is 'badminton rackets' then
ideally you want most of your incoming links to have 'badminton
rackets' in the anchor text. This alone can produce high rankings
in the search engines.
When
someone types in 'badminton rackets' into a search engine,
the algorithm will know that lots of websites link to your
website using the phrase 'badminton rackets' and so will know
this is what your website is about. It will also know from
the content, title and theme of your website that this is
what it is about so will be more inclined to put you in a
good position for the term. If you and a competitor have a
similar PageRank and similar on
page factors, but you have more links with the search
term in the anchor text, it should mean you will be ranked
higher in the searh results, meaning more visitors for you.
One
thing to note, In recent updates of the algorythm it seems
that sites with the same anchor text on their incoming links
have lost a lot of the benefit, where as sites with varied
anchor text seem to have gained, or at least remained the
same.
Therefor,
ensure you do not always use identical anchor text in you
incoming links, this will ensure your links look natural to
the SE's. Still however work your key words into them when
you can.
This
is also important for your internal links. Your internal
links to other pages should include the keywords or phrase
you are optimising that target page for. It works
for the same reasons as external links but they obviously
don't carry quite as much weight, (although you will likely
have many more of them! most internal pages don't have many
external links pointing to them, so make the most of the internal
links!) |
