Hey guys, after reading several of these threads in the forum today I realised that not a lot of people actually understand what the Anchor text is and what your supposed to do in order to optimise incoming links whether they be external or internal for a web page. So I hope this makes it a little clearer. The anchor text is the highlighted text in a hyperlink. A hyperlink is a peice of text (the anchor text) that is highlighted and links to another website or web page. Take this for example. <a href="http://back-links.org/">SEO Tips</a> That is the HTML code for a hyper link, the anchor text is highlighted in Red. Another example of a finished hyperlink is here SEO Tips The only part of this hyperlink that is visible is the Anchor text. The overall idea here is to ensure that your keywords are placed as the anchor text in any link being directed to your website. As you can see with my examples above the obvious keyword I am optimising my website for is "SEO Tips" therefore in order to increase my strength in the search engines for this keyword I ensure I have a sufficient amount of incoming links with "SEO Tips" as the anchor text. This helps for me to compete against the other websites in the search engines. This is the main strategy behind off page optimisation so it is very important that you understand how to properly optimise your websites links. Hope this helped, if you need any more information or your confused please visit my SEO Tips website or leave a reply here.
Thanks for the tip and the explanation. This will help alot of people, especially those just starting out.
Perfect timing on this post. My daughter is going to be posting a press release for me this weekend and I need to explain to her about links, text links, and keyword linking.
No problems. If you need to know more about linking then you can read my in depth article here Link Building Explained
it was originally called anchor text because it 'anchored' a position on a page so you could jump to it with a hyper link. In fact, I remember the original browsers way back when using a little anchor symbol for them.
Thats a good definition of anchor text, but I never seem to be able to jump to a particular word or title on a page. I must be setting up the anchor text wrong. My links generally just lead to a page and not the item I would like it too. I must look into this.
From what you described that is an Anchor text. What your trying to do is different from an Anchor text and although it incorporates an Anchor text within it its more about changing the HTML code. To link to another part of a webpage what you have to do is add an "id attribute" For example <<p id="here"> then you would end it with </p> and your link would look like <a href="#here">click here</a> Its a more complex version of linking to a certain part of the page because this is the xhtml version. Hope this helps.
Great post, do you have a rule of thumb for how often you try to use internal linking with anchor text? Or a maximum amount of anchor text links you use say every x amount of words?
I have a question. I understand anchor text but what do you do for blog commenting if the anchor text is considered spam by akismet? A lot of the keywords I target get rejected. I thought it was my site until I talked to a guy from akismet and found out it was my keywords.
Glad you enjoyed it. I always use my keywords in my Anchor Text when Internal Linking. I don't always just put the keyword in though, i mix it up a little and perhaps add the full article title. I generally have two or three variations of the same keywords for my anchor text per article/page/URL. Very strange that your comments get rejected because of your keywords, obviously your keywords must be in a high spam market/zone. I am not sure what to recommend for this except an alternative route of link building. But remember blog commenting is not only about building the links its about building traffic. Perhaps try targeting a different keyword for blog commenting.
Thanks for the tips willyboy. Another question about anchor text. If I use 2 keyword phrases together will google pick it up for both phrases or only the entire chain?
Had another question I just thought of. Let's say you target a keyword chain and you use it in an article that you post on ezinearticles that links back to your blog. If that keyword only shows up in your meta tag will google still rank you for that keyword chain?