SEO – Anchor Text

Anchor text in a web page is a gateway to yet another page in the website. It reflects what you can expect from the page, which you are about the view. So, anchor text is an important entity in web design and search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO experts have come up with various ways to write the anchor text in a standard website. They feel that if you optimize the anchor text, you will be able to attract more customers and increase search engine ranking.

Anchor Text is important for both internal website structure and external linking.

Internally it is wise to use anchor text with your keywords when you link between pages in your website.

To use an Anchor Text Hyperlink view code example here:

Your anchor text

When you discuss a topic in the content of your web page and mention a keyword that is covered on its own page, you should use a hyper linked anchor text to that page. Anchor text is a factor that can increase your Search Engine Results for keywords and are assumed to be part of Google’s algorithm to determine search engine results.

A prime place to have anchor test is also in the footer section of your website where copyright information is placed.

Example:

2005 Copywrite- All rights reserved “Keyword” www.yoursitename.com

(Hyper Linking the word “keyword” to the url for the page where this Keyword prominent)

External Linking should also utilize the anchor text hyper linking method.

Your anchor text

From articles, to forum signatures, to reciprocal links or, link to us directions, all should include your Major Keyword as a descriptive anchor text hyper link.

It is smart to utilize several different keyword anchor text hyperlinks for various different backlinks. Make a list of all your major keyword phrases and create the anchor link code. Each time you link to a different site, attempt to place a different anchor text link on each site. If you have five major keyword Phrases, you should have multiple links for each of those anchor text hyperlinks.

Watch your search engine results and traffic increase when you utilize the power of anchor text hyper linking.

You should consider the size of your website files both for the benefit of search engines and your visitors.

Obviously, you want your visitors to be able to get your website to load fast, but you need to help the search engines as well.

You can reduce the file size in a couple of ways:

1.) Use External Style Sheets

2.) Use Validated Code

3.) Cut out all the junk

Most search engines spiders don’t read JavaScript unless you include it from another page, so consider making all your menus real hyperlinks with anchor text. Your pages will load faster and the SE’s will be happier.

Reducing the size of your pages will help with your overall search engine optimization.

Linking within a site is an often over-looked yet very important part of SEO. This is especially true for larger websites. Have you noticed that when you search for a particular website, the homepage frequently comes up first? One reason for this has to do with internal linking.

Internal linking is your way of telling the search engines which pages you feel are the most important.

Even more important than having the proper keyword density is linking your pages correctly internally. It’s probably the most overlooked aspect of good SEO.

You can have every page inside your site link back to a single page and raise its PR just from the links you created. It’s better than nothing, right? A large part of SEO at this point is naming your anchor links and using them internally. You will notice through out this site we link to certain pages within our text. This is both to help you navigate through our internal SEO strategies, but to also help the search engines by showing them what pages are important to us.

Think about this SEO strategy from a e-commerce aspect. Would you rather have a high Terms Of Service page or a high Ranking Sales page? I know which one I would prefer.

A basic crash course into this internal linking strategy is to make sure that every page on your site passes PR back to your home page. This can be done by simply adding a anchor text link to the footer of your website (look we did it here).

You can also link every page on your site from your site map if you have “orphan” pages that need to be crawled by the engines that you don’t include in your menu. A sitemap is a basic page that has a hyperlink for every single page that you want the search engines to find.