Why Is The Anchor Text So Vital To Getting Organic Traffic? by Mark Daniels

Why Is The Anchor Text So Vital To Getting Organic Traffic?
by: Mark Daniels

The anchor text is the words that you click on in a hyperlink. The words in the anchor text can determine a page's your search engine ranking. This text is also referred to as the link label. While anchor text is not necessarily related to the link's actual text, it is more useful to readers if it is. So be sure that such text links are related to the destination's content. If search engines can figure out the topic of your page by the anchor text, this will move you up in search results.

Therefore, careful use of anchor text can increase the number of hits your pages receive. Avoid the common mistake of using "click here" as your link text, since it hardly ever provides search engines with relevant information. Text backlinks also lead visitors to your pages. Occasionally backlinks are dubbed inbound links. A page can achieve top Google ranking without using the search phrase on the destination page. This is known as "Google bombing" (or simply link bombing). Some of these link bombs are pranks, such as the famous 2003 Googlebomb pointing searchers to the White House page for President George W. Bush -- as the best response when anyone typed in the phrase "miserable failure." Link bombs have helped bloggers who use humorous phrases as backlinks to win a high ranking. If you rank for uncommon search terms, those ranks will be higher whenever it is searched. On the other hand, a widely used term gets pages of search results.

However, Google announced in January 2007 that a reduction in "Google bombing" was a result of enhancements made to the search process. You can help other sites link to your pages by providing the HTML to add your link to their pages. This way, you get to choose the anchor text. But be careful -- if your site is all about learning Spanish, you will not want to have "learn Spanish" as the phrase in every link to your site. This can bring about another problem, referred to as "over-optimizing." If you use your keyword too often, the search engines may penalize you for keyword stuffing or spamming. On the other hand, most search engines, and especially Google, rank websites higher, if they have numerous high-quality backlinks.

Two examples of quality backlinks are:

1) optimized search phrases pointing back to your site
2) The highly relevant content on the backlinking website

When designing your web site, here are the best methods to use anchor text links:

1) Use links that originate outside your site
2) Internal links inside your website
3) Links from your site's home page, especially in site navigation maps

Finally, keep in mind that you are attempting to bring in real people, not just search engines, so the phrases in your anchor text links seem sensible to readers, in order to be useful to them, and thus to result in a greater amount of readers.

About The Author

Mark Daniels has worked for numerous website companies and is always interested in new ventures. Anchor-text.com is a brand new SEO performance based marketing company . . . if they don’t get you to the 1st page of Google’s organic listings, you don’t pay.

http://www.anchor-text.com