Anchor Text

It is pretty obvious that sending relevant high quality links to your website can help your ranking on the search engines. However you can get a boost to the link value by incorporation your keywords within your text link.

These keywords are then often called anchor text, because it helps the search engine understand why that website linked to you and will reward you with better rankings. For example if you have a site that you want to rank for the key word “Purple Widget”, then ensure theses keywords are within the text link to your site. Rather than presenting the link only as your URL.

You do need to be careful though. If you send too many links with exactly the same anchor text within, it will become obvious that these links were not crated naturally and were manufactured for better SEO purposes. Google and other search engines have equations that help identify these situations and rather than your rankings improving, it is very likely you could lose positions.

So the trick is to vary the keywords you use when you ask another site to link to you a professional seo company would always do this, in fact the variation will often relate to consumers using different search terms anyway.

Long tail anchor text is normally when 3 words or more are used as a search term within the link. These terms are often easier to rank for and although will deliver less traffic, it is also true that then can realise better conversion rates if you are able to match a very specific web page to that search a consumer has made.

You should also make sure your anchor text does match that page of the website. If you end up sending a link with the same anchor text to 2 or more pages within the same site, it can be difficult for Google to decide which page should gain the positions.