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How to use anchor text to your advantage

Guest post by: Andrew Rondeau

Article Overview: Search engine optimization is built on hundreds of different variables, controls, and factors. From keyword optimization to image tags, there are hundreds of different parts of your website’s design, both on-page and off-page, that help the major search engines decide where it ranks. Thankfully, a lot of these factors are controllable, either directly through web coding or more indirectly through link manipulation and controlled link building.

How to use anchor text to your advantage

Search engine optimization is built on hundreds of different variables, controls, and factors. From keyword optimization to image tags, there are hundreds of different parts of your website’s design, both on-page and off-page, that help the major search engines decide where it ranks.

Thankfully, a lot of these factors are controllable, either directly through web coding or more indirectly through link manipulation and controlled link building.

However, one factor that’s often passed over is the anchor text. An absolutely essential part of search engine optimization, the anchor test is simply the text that appears as part of any text link.

For example, a link to Google could be branded ‘Google’, leading the URL to become associated with that search term. Another example would be a lengthy domain name, which is related to picture frames, being shortened to just ‘picture frames’ when seen as an on-page link.

These anchor text terms are especially important for search engine marketers looking to increase their traffic through keyword optimization. While one part of on-page SEO is designing pages to return as results for specific keywords, another off-page aspect is incorpating the right keywords into your external links.

Whenever a page is linked to / from another website, there’s anchor text that’s tied to it. By controlling (or at least attempting to control) this anchor text, you can create a keyword tie that’s permanently linking your domain address to a certain link term.

Here’s a literal, and completely truthful, example of how this system can be used to your advantage. A couple of years ago, an online finance website (that shall remain nameless) set about designing an SEO strategy built on social bookmarking websites and social media link traffic. They were looking to advertise credit card affiliate programs on their website, which naturally lead them to using ‘credit card’ as part of their link anchor text.

The company designed a fake news article describing a boy stealing a credit card, and buying a long list of inappropriate items with it. Of course, social media websites ate the story up, with amused readers providing thousands of links back to the original website. This is no unusual occurrence, or at least the last part isn’t. Social bookmarking services generate hundreds of links all the time.

What made this example unusual is that it was entirely a hoax, and that the payoff wasn’t in direct sales, but in linking power.

Every one of those text links had the term ‘credit card’ in the anchor text.

What thousands of social bookmarking members had been part of was one of the biggest link building hoaxes of all time. The company rocketed through the search engines and started ranking way up near the top of the results, all for a very competitive keyword and all because of an innovative anchor text strategy.

So next time you’re trying to optimize anchor text links, think outside the box. While there are great results in running the same course as everyone else, the real benefits kick in when you can look outside the system, see the benefits of running a non-conventional campaign, and mastering anchor text for social linking.

Angela's Backlinks are a great start to any back-linking strategy.

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Article Tags: blog income, blogging guide, make a blog



Related Forum Posts
Re: Why is Adobe #1 for the keyword "Click Here" in Google? - It's simply because they have enough links pointing to them with the anchor "click here" to get them to the #1 spot. They either have the most backlinks with that anchor or the strongest backlinks with that anchor, or both.
Getting links from the giants - Hi Kevin - it's simple - what do you have to offer them? What kind of compelling reason can you give them to link to you? According to my Google Webmaster Central Tools I have a total of 15,937 links to my site. 4,523 of them go to my homepage while the remaining 11,414 go to various pages on my site. My last sitemap indicated that I have 34,789 pages of content on my website so, excluding the homepage, I have about one link for every three pages of content. I think it’s important to also note that I don’t do any link buying and never tell people what anchor text to use when they link to me. I always suggest that they use whatever text they feel best describes the page they are linking to on my site (if everyone links to you with the same anchor text you can get penalized from Google). Having great content is one way to build links but usually you also need to take an active approach to marketing yourself. Can you build a section on your shoe site along the lines of "The Tennis Player's Ultimate Guide To Buying Shoes" where you talk about all the different considerations someone needs to make before buying shoes - and then at the end recommend Nike? In return Nike links to the site because it's a 3rd party endorsement of their products. Many big companies have News sections on their sites and always love showing off good news - you just need to find a way to give them something worth showing off!
Re: SEO Website Directory - For me I personally get about 20% of traffic through directorys - but any exposure is better than none! Also, Its good to get listed on directorys with you choice of keywords in your anchor text - giving you better rankings in search engines.
Re: Blogging for Entrepreneurs - Hi, Plus Search Engines LOVE blogs. If you can update your blog a few times a week that will go along way. Plus you like David said linking to internal pages (use good anchor text) can help other pages of your website be indexed faster & higher in the search engines. Jeff
Re: What's Up With Word Clouds? - Hi GT, Nice topic, an a little change from the usual conversation. In your post you mentioned everything about word tags, you can see them in blogs, advertising etc. I also seen them in link directories, you can choose one word to use as your anchor text, or a long phrase, some also let you suggest your own phrase, I don't know if it's true but i read somewhere it is very expensive to link to this sites. A tag cloud can add some color to a website, I can't see any other benefit it can have.


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