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If you have done some serious reading about your website
optimization, you probably would have come across the reference to the
phrase “optimization of anchor text”. This article shall discuss 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 ourSEO case studies
for validation to evaluate our 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 hyperlink, “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 “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 use the format:
Read all about Anchor Text Optimization.
Instead of
Read all about Anchor Text Optimization here.
The above example shows us that you can leverage the hyperlinking of
important keyword phrases instead of hyperlinking unrelated text wherever
possible. It is always a great idea to 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: -
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 top-10 ranking. This
is not true. Search engine
submission only announces your site’s existence to search engines. To
get a good search engine
ranking, it is important that you carry out Title tag
optimization, Meta tags
optimization and anchor text
optimization of your website amongst other SEO techniques. You’ll
need to optimize the visible text of your site through SEO
copywriting after an extensive keyword phrase
research. It is also important to boost your Google PageRank in
order to get a good website
ranking. You can increase PageRank of
your site by building your site’s link popularity
through a link building
campaign. A link exchange
campaign with good industry relevant sites is the simplest way to get
several incoming links to
your site quickly. Remember, search engine positioning is a powerful
media for your website
promotion.
Now notice below how the above text is reformatted where highly
relevant keyword phrases have been 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 top-10
ranking. This is not true. Search engine
submission only announces your site’s existence to
search engines. To get a good search engine ranking, it is important that you carry out Title tag
optimization, Meta tags
optimization and anchor text
optimization of your website amongst other SEO techniques. You’ll need to optimize the visible text of your site
through SEO
copywriting after an extensive keyword phrase
research. It is also important to boost your
Google
PageRank in order to get a good website ranking.You
can increase
PageRank of your site by building your site’s
link
popularity through a link building
campaign. A
link exchange campaign with good industry relevant
sites is the simplest way to get several incoming links to
your site quickly. Remember, search engine positioningis a powerful media for your website promotion. 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.
You may not have noticed, but the first paragraph also has the same
keywords hyperlinked, but without usual underlines. Bring your mouse over
the keywords to notice your cursor show up the hyperlink.
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:
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.
About the author:
Jagdeep.S. Pannu (Jerry) is Manager, Online Marketing, at http://www.seorank.com/,
a leading Search
Engine Optimization services company.
© Copyright 2004 Jagdeep S. Pannu, SEORank
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