The Importance of Good Anchor Text in SEO
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The Importance of Good Anchor Text in SEO
Too many webmasters think they can rank well in search engines just by buying a large number of links to their web site. This is simply not true, because search engines also evaluate the anchor text of the links. Getting a large number of links with the same non-optimized anchor text has limited traffic potential compared to using anchor text effectively.
The most common anchor text found in links to a web site is generally the name of the site. The effect of such links to search engine ranking depends on the name of the site. If site name is well optimized for keywords, such links may be good for search engine optimization. Often this is, however, not the case, and links with other, more descriptive anchor texts would have a much greater effect.
Adding Search Terms
No web site should target only one keyword, or key phrase in search engines. Having the site rank well for multiple keywords may multiply the organic traffic. Anchor text in inbound links is a good way to help search engine ranking for secondary keywords, which you will not want to make more prominent on-site.
Particularly in Google, pages may rank quite well for anchor text keywords, even if the page did not feature the term at all. An example of this are the Google bombs, where pages about George Bush have ranked for “dumb motherfucker”, and Microsoft at one time ranked for “more evil than satan himself”. The same technique can be brought to
SEO use too.
Anchor Text with Long Tail Keywords
If a page has a large number of inbound links with the same keyword as the anchor text, if will rank high for the term. It is especially easy to use this technique with low competition search terms, where there is no clear best page to show for the term yet. Long tail keywords - targeted key phrases with multiple words - are just these kinds of keywords, as they have little competition.
Researching long tail keywords relating to your web site content, and acquiring links with those phrases as the anchor text can increase the number of terms your site can be found with. By getting ranked for multiple such long tail keywords, a web site can get a large total number of visitors for search engines. The best part of it is that it also works with new web sites, and sites with relatively little backlinks.
