How to Use Anchor Text Effectively

Whenever a reader views a web page and sees clickable text, sometimes underlined, sometimes with a different color, or sometimes the cursor changes when they hover it, these are what we call hyperlinks in the web. You might see these hyperlinks as ordinary words like “click here” or descriptive text like “SEO, Link Building” and sometimes you just see the whole link itself like http://google.com. Throughout your link building process or campaign you should use highly descriptive text of your links, this would increase your search engine rankings for keywords that are being targeted by your site.

Sample Html Link Code <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>ANCHOR TEXT</a>

Why Use Proper Anchor Text to Your Links

We cannot control all anchor text placed in our links going to our site, so do take advantage of this when we can control the proper placement of words on tip of our links. As we mentioned above, links can be shown to our readers far different from what the links itself shows. Using effective anchor text not only will it give us control on what words we are going to use to describe our site or destination page, but it will also help our site’s rankings with search engines by using proper descriptions, texts or words relative to our site, specially for the keywords that our site is aiming for.

Some examples where we can control placement of our anchor text:

• Web Directories
• Article Directories
• Forum Signatures
• Link Exchange
• Internal Links
• Social Sites
• Squidoo.com
• etc.

What Anchor Text to Use

With the examples cited above where we have control over the proper anchor text we can use, choose the most descriptive words as possible, describe your site, your services, the contents of your destination web page. So instead of just typing the title of your site with web directories, use your major keywords and put some variations around them, example if your site is all about link building, you may want to use “Link Building Strategies,” “Link Building Tips,” “Link Building Gimmicks,” “Great Link Building Techniques,” etc. For internal links within your web pages, specially if you want to recall a post you have written, emphasize some points or define some terms, you may use the title of the web page or post, use keywords describing the contents of your web page or use the optimized keywords for that page as your anchor text. This use of descriptive keywords will greatly boost your website’s favor with search engines.

Do We Have to Use Anchor Text for External Links

For outgoing links placed in your web pages, articles, posts or contents, you may also want to use descriptive texts. So instead of using “click here” or “article source” you may can use words that will describe the contents of the destination page of the link. This will not only help guide your readers, or help search engines describe the link but your will also help other website owners to gain rankings with search engines for the keywords or descriptions that are used.

Help this Site - Bookmark It

Hide Sites