In order for us to properly understand the importance of using anchor text correctly in our search engine optimization, it is first paramount that we understand who it's important to and why!
Anchor text is quite simply the word text you insert into your hyperlinks. A hyperlink is basically a clickable link in a webpage that takes the visitor to either a different page of that site, or a completely different site altogether. Hyperlinks tend to look something like this .
Now there are 2 reasons that these are important! Firstly, links help visitors or customers understand why they are being directed to different pages and what relevance the page should have to their search, and it can also help site navigation. Secondly and more importantly the main objective of search engines is to provide their customers with information that is relevant to the search results.
So how do the search engines do this? Quite simply the major search engines use algorithms to add huge weight to the relevancy of "anchor text" in hyperlinks. They want to make sure that when a customer clicks through a link the end up on a landing page that is completely relevant to their initial enquiry.
In terms of how this is useful to us it's obvious! As long as we use anchor texts correctly for our keywords this enables to gain a lot better rankings with the search engines for the terms we want to get onto the first page for. The key here is relevancy! A very common mistake made by a lot of webmasters is inserting "Click Here", or "Go Here" in their hyperlinks as anchor text.
Evidently this is of no use to the search engines or the potential customers. What use would it be if our keyword was "designer shoes" and you had "Click Here" inserted in your hyperlink. Whoever was searching for "designer shoes" would not find your site in the search engines and neither would the the search engines know your site has any relevancy to the term "designer shoes"! If you searched for click here and sifted through all the results you might get lucky! Do a search on Google for "Click Here" and there are over 2.2 billion results. Good luck getting found in that crowd!
Anchor Text if used correctly can massively enhance your chances of getting ranked highly with the search engines for your chosen keywords. By using relevant anchor text you are making sure that the search engines see how important your site is for that particular search term and therefore increasing your PR
Obviously you can use links within you site to help with this, but the most powerful way of using effective placement of anchor text is to do so whilst creating backlinks in Articles, Directories, Social Bookmarking and Blogging. In a nutshell the more quality backlinks you have containing your anchor text the more important the search engines will see your site for that search phrase and as a result the better PR you will achieve!
In fact the correct placement of anchor text is so powerful, some people took it to the next level and developed what became known as "Google Bombing". This was where some webmasters would create links with humorous anchor text in order to generate funny search results. As a result, in 2007 Google had to change their algorithms slightly to try and reduce the effect of what became known as a "Google Bomb "
This is surely testament to the fact that correctly placed anchor text significantly helps your search engine optimisation. It is for this reason and this reason alone why all webmasters should focus heavily on relevant anchor text and ensure that the text they use has relevancy to the page the link is sending the visitor to!
If done correctly the end result is quite simple, you get great PR and some quality search engine optimization, the visitors get sent to relevant pages for their search requirements and finally the search engines are kept happy as their customers are getting targeted relevant search results. It's a win win situation for all parties concerned!
In order to create a hyperlink you can quite simply use the 'insert hyperlink' button in word, or alternatively do it the old fashioned way which is how I have always generated them and still do, call me old fashioned if you like!
The syntax for creating search relevant hyperlink could be as follows
< a href="http://www.yoursite.com"> Anchor Text < /a >
Obviously once you have created your hyperlink all you need to do is change 'YourSite.com' to your URL swop the Anchor Text to what ever Keyword you are focusing on, and just remove all spaces except the one between a & href.
For example one I might do in an article would be
Earn Money From Home
Once uploaded to a website software package such as Frontpage, Dreamwaver or even a Blog this would be turned into a clickable link that would read a lot nicer and look something like this Internet Business or another one might be something along the lines of Earn Extra Income
It's literally that simple! So make sure you add relevant anchor text links to all of your articles and blogs etc to increase your PR and more importantly your bottom line. As we all know the best type of traffic is FREE.
