Do you know what, one of the lesser known, and taken for granted website creation tool the ‘Anchor Text’ can be one of the most influential with the search engines especially Google. Why?
Anchor text is the text a user clicks when clicking a link on a web page,and usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination.
Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page.
Anchor text optimization can be deployed throughout your site to enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content and is also an important way of showing the search engines, as well as your visitors, just what they’re getting when they land on the page.
The best bit is that Anchor text is so important that it’s possible for a page to appear in the top 10 in Google’s search results for a phrase which isn’t mentioned anywhere on the page.
Google’s Webmaster Tools facilitate this optimization by letting website owners view the most common words in anchor text linking to their site. The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. In fact Google even has a special operator: allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. Google/Yahoo bombing is the practice of placing terms you want a given page to rank for in anchor text that links to that page.
Because Google, among other search engines, puts a significant amount of weight on the anchor text of inbound links, anchor text can be a decisive factor when going after top ranking on extremely competitive search terms.
Do not underestimate the power of the common Anchor Text, start to take advantage of its benefits now!
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Tags: anchor text, external links, internal links, intersite links, page linking, website links