Over the coming months, we’ll focus on important factors that can affect your Web site’s visibility on the search engines. Last month, we focused on the title tag optimization (the bookmark or favorite), arguably the most important piece of your SEO jigsaw. This month, it’s all about “anchor text”, a worthy lieutenant.

Quickly, what is SEO? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is the process by which a Web site is prepared so that it ranks well and appears favorably in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for keyword phrases. And “White Hat” SEO? It’s the ethical, honest way to optimize a Web site for the search engines without resorting to skullduggery and trickery. On the other hand, “Black Hat” SEO uses techniques which try to fool the engines and can get you banned.

On with the article…

#2: ANCHOR TEXT
The “anchor text” is the text inside a text link pointing towards a Web page. The phrasing, terms, order and length of a link’s anchor text is one of the largest factors taken into account by the major engines for ranking.

For example:

“At Paul Mycroft + Company, we offer professional web design as well as an outstanding, free monthly HTML email newsletter.”

Here, the words “professional web design” and “HTML email newsletter” are hyperlinked to the Web pages www.paulmycroft.com/services/ and www.paulmycroft.com/newsletter/ respectively. The words within the link – “professional web design” and “HTML email newsletter” – are called the “anchor text.”

Also, within the code for the anchor text is something called the “title” attribute. This should also be used to describe what is on the LINKED TO page.

Anchor text should be used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links TO, which enhances the relevance of the “target” or the “landing page” to the search engines. While it also enhances the page linking FROM, the real benefit is gained by the page linked TO. In the above example, the two pages will benefit from the text used in the link TO them.

The inclusion of your most important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of the recipient page. All major search engines place significant importance to the anchor text on your pages. In fact, Google even has a special operator (a Google-specific calculator that you can type into the address bar where www.name.com goes): ‘allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages.

As of March 28, 2007, Google has indexed 180,000 pages using “professional web design” and 17,900 for “HTML email newsletter” in anchor text.

When using anchor text, it’s much better (and makes more sense) to use:

“Read about web design and its benefits.”

instead of:

“Click here to read about web design and its benefits.”

As well as using your most important keywords in the anchor text within your site, any inbound links from external Web sites should also follow suit. Not only will you benefit from an inbound link, especially if its from a high ranking page, but you will benefit from the text used in the link. As it’s usually hard work to get the right inbound link, try supplying the text to be used. That way, you can make sure the right link and text are being used to link to your Web site.

If you have a number of news articles on your Web site try and link the headline to its article as:

1. you’ll be using keywords in the header tag, also seen as an important factor by the search engines,
2. you’ll be using your keywords in the anchor text to the article
3. you’ll be benefiting the article itself – especially if you have your important keywords in it – as the headline is 100% relevant to the header linking to it.

Lastly, the words used around the anchor text (outside the link) can also benefit the link and recipient page.

Next month, we’ll focus on #3: use of keywords in your copy.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 8:39 pm.