Effective Anchor Text Tips

Anchor text is the text you see that is linked. For example Paul’s Hit team, the text is obvious and link you go to is http://peuan.com. The Anchor text is Paul’s Hit Team.

Anchor Text is usually on links that link to your webpage. These are called inbound links and search engines use this text, especially Google, to determine what they show in thier SERPs. Anchor text has a huge effect on page rankings. In fact, with enough inbound links with effective anchor texts, a webpage can attain a high page ranking even if they do utilize any other forms of SEO. Anchor text is usually the deciding factor for very difficult and competitive SERPs.

So, to use anchor text effectively you need to ensure that the anchor text is relevant to the page it links to. It is not going to help a page about fish if the anchor text says something like “the best bikes on earth”. A site that links to another site with effective anchor text can benefit as well, however, this is not always the case. When you link to a page, if your intent is to give a value added backlink then using keywords that appear on the linked to page, preferably keywords in the h1 tag of the page or keywords in the first couple sentences would be most beneficial to both the linked page and your page you are linking from.

If you add other related anchor text links on the page that is linked to, you can benefit more, so add related links to your pages whether via a menu or linked body text in your page. As well if you link this page to itself helps too.

There are many problems with anchor text such as descriptive text, space limitations, etc. One of the problems is that you might only have so much space. You might be linking from a menu that is only so wide. Making the link descriptive might make your link wrap around and take away the professional look of your page. Even though SEs like this, us humans do not. We need to find a balance, if you were to write your pages so that search engines loved them, people surfing to your pages might not and quickly type in a new url or even worse just close the browser tab.

One of the biggest mistakes I see, which I myself am guilty of is having a ‘home’ link in menus, after all I do not want to compete or waste my valuable anchor text trying to rank in SEs for the word ‘home’. With that said, I do want my visitors to easily navigate through my site.. so naming my ‘home’ link ‘SEOBlog@Peuan Home’ would be more effective. This gives a perfect example of space limitations as I can’t afford a long name like that.

If you use an image as a header on your page as many sites do, then the ALT or alternative text of an image tag is the same as the anchor text of a link. Also, you might use an image to link to a site or you might provide a link with an image for people to easily link to your site. So I could make a nice ‘Home’ image for my menu and use descriptive alt text to get past this space limitation of a menu width.

Here is an example of alt text used on an image with rich descriptive text. To see the text put your mouse pointer over the image.

Even if you have images that are non-linked such as just pretty graphics you will benefit using the alt text option of the img src code.One last thing about links is to use the title option when linking. Use descriptive text and get the most of your links. Here is
the code used for the image link above. Notice the “title” in the href link and the “alt” text for the image. As you can see you have lots of space for descriptive text you can take advantage of without mucking up your page layout.

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