Anchor Text for Search Engines
Introduction
Anchor text is used throughout the web. It is one of the
very first of the attributes of html itself. In fact, anchor
text was a staple with web pages even before most of the formatting
tools such as tables were available. With such a history,
it is understandable that anchor text would become one of
the most important parts of search engine algorithms.
Anchor text is simply the text you see that is hyper linked
to other parts of the site, or web. Hyper linking is basic
to the World Wide Web and html coding. An example of anchor
text and hyper linking is:
"Today, Search
Engine Optimization is central to any successful Internet
marketing strategy."
The anchor text of the example above is "Search Engine
Optimization" and "Internet marketing". The
anchor text "Search Engine Optimization" points
to, or is hyper linked to, the web page "http://cybermarketingpro.com/seo.htm".
The anchor text "Internet marketing" points to the
main page for the site "http://cybermarketingpro.com".
Search Engines and Anchor Text
Search engines now use anchor text to rank a site under their
key word searches. Originally they used the meta information
in the site header to rank the sites, but this proved to be
easily manipulated by the site creators. One of the biggest
reasons for the increasing relevance of Google is their reliance
on anchor text and hyper linking rather than meta tags.
The big changes in the Yahoo and Msn search engines are also
using anchor text as a major part of their respective algorithms.
These engines have spent millions of dollars and man-hours
to increase the importance of hyper linking and anchor text
in their algorithms.
While internal anchor text is not
as important as external, it still carries plenty of weight.
As you write your pages, include the key words you want pointed
to your site. then, increase the importance of these key words
by using them as anchor text in internal
hyper links.
A tool you can use to check the importance of anchor text
is to use the Google keyword, allinanchor. When you make a
search, put "allinanchor:", without quotes in front
of your keywords. Example: allinanchor: internet mareting
This will enhance the importance of the anchor text in the
search results.
Increase the Importance of the Page
Google's search algorithm also includes other important parameters
such as the page title, but the anchor text and the hyperlinks
are the most important. In fact, Google puts huge emphasis
on page ranking, link reputation, and link popularity.
Page ranking is a score that Google gives to the page to
grade the importance of the page. This has become the industry
standard. It is derived by the number of other web sites that
link to your page.
Link reputation is a score based on what other site's page
titles and links, (anchor text) are saying about your page.
Link popularity is about the number of incoming links pointing
to your page.
One of the most important parts of this linking is the anchor
text used to create the link. If much of the anchor text for
the linking pages happens to be widely used for keyword searches,
the pages that are the targets of the link will float closer
to the top of the results for these searches.
Optimize Anchor Text in Your Site
As you create the content for your site, you will naturally
include keywords that will be used by people to search your
topic. When I say naturally, I mean that your links need to
be smoothly placed in text that reads well. It is self defeating
to drive your site high in the engines, only to chase people
off because it is difficult to read.
For instance, you should use a link like, get information
on search engine optimization, rather
than get information on search engine optimization here.
Create Anchor Text that Enhances desired Keywords
You can put keywords linked to the various pages of your
web site peppered throughout your text. The search
engines love it. There are a few things you will need
to be careful of.
- First, don't use too much linking on your text. If your
text is search
engine freindly, but your users can't read it because
of linking distractions, it will be rather self defeating.
- Then, to be people friendly, your text has to make sense.
If it doesn't you're wasting your time.
- The more content the better, but you should put the most
people friendly information
at the top of the page where people will read it. Put the
search engine
optimized material closer to the bottom. Like the newspapers,
you'll put the best information first.
- Change your keywords. Though you want to have multiple
links using the keywords you are trying to optimize for,
you need to change the order of the keywords, and add some
others as well. If you try to use one keyword phrase, you
can get an over-optimization penalty with the major search
engines, especially for the high cometition keywords.
An Example of Highly Linked Text
Any search engine
marketing endeavor needs to use searh
engine optimization as a major part of web
site design. You
cannot acheive top
10 ranking by just submitting your site.
It needs to be highly optimized
for search engine placement. If you have well recognized
sites linking to yours, you won't even need to submit
your site. The search
engines will find it with their robots following
the links
of the sites that have good Google
page rank. You will need to do intensive
research to
find the best
keywords and find the keyword
phrases that
are most popular. =
You can see that while the above example is optimized
for search engine placement, it also has so much anchor
text that it is hard to read.
Here is the same paragraph with the html coded so the links
don't show up unles you mouse over them.
Any search
engine marketing endeavor needs
to use search
engine optimization as a major part of web
site design. You cannot acheive top
10 ranking by just submitting your site. It needs to
be highly optimized
for search engine placement. If you have well recognized
sites linking to yours, you won't even need to submit
your site. The search
engines will find it with their robots following the links
of the sites that have good Google
page rank. You will need to do intensive
research to find the best
keywords and find the keyword
phrases that are most popular.
This example has all the same linking
power of the previous
example, but your users can read it as well.
Here is an example of the html code
for and anchor link without the line and change of color:
<a href="http://cybermarketingprocom/seo.htm" class="noUnderline">search
engine optimization</a>
We created the class in a style sheet
and applied to style to the anchor.
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