In the complicated world of SEO (search engine optimization) there are a lot of words that don’t make sense to people.  Have you ever wondered what exactly “anchor text” is, I sure have. I still meet marketers who have been around a while, but still don’t know what it exactly means, sure not what the benefit are.  Here are a simple explanation and how it can help your rankings with the search engines.  I like it simple.

Anchor text is the words on a page that is “hyperlinked” it’s the words on a site that are clickable.

If you read regularly on our blog you will find words like blogging, free traffic and Internet marketing a number of times, and you can almost always click on them, in which “blog”, “free traffic” and “internet marketing” is the anchor text like abowe

Anchor text should give your readers valuable information about the content of the page you’re linking to.  Here’s is the reason anchor text can be powerful:
*Search engines finds out what the page is about. If you use this the right way you can boost your ranking, especially in Google. Don’t use anchor texts like “click here” or “read this” because you are telling the search engines that the subject is “click here” or “read this. Use a key word phrase that is a relevant topic on the URL destination, and you will score points with the search engines.

You wouldn’t rank highly for “click here” or “read this” and it’s probably lot a lot of related search term to your site?  To illustrate the power of anchor text you can be on google’s first page for a key word phrase that isn’t mentioned anywhere else on the site.

There are some blogger that have some fun with this topic, and use anchor text for humorous phrases, they use what is called “google bombing” and they get highly ranked for these humorous phrases.  If it’s a low competitive keyword only a handful of anchor text will give you a first page position with google.  For highly competitive keyword you need hundreds and some time thousands of links.  Since January 2007 it’s harder to use “google bombing” but anchor text is still powerful.

If you have your link on other sites it is a good idea to provide the link in html format because you will then determine what’s in the anchor text.  However, you should not make your site look like one big link, so don’t overdo it but choose your anchor text and enjoy the ride up the page rank ladder.  Better ranking, more traffic and more bucks for you.

You can use anchor text in: external links (from other sites like article directories), internal links (from one internal page to another) and my favorite is to link back to your main domain from all sub-domains/pages.   It’s vice to keep in mind that there are real people that are reading your sites, so the anchor text needs to make sense to the reader.  Because when you have a nice flow of new readers every day, and old visitor’s are back all the time, your traffic will at some point reach the tipping point.

To your ongoing and a bit easier Internet marketing success
André & Tom

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