The Importance of Anchor Text in a Backlinking

Anchor text is an important part of any link building campaign. Although all links are useful, utilizing the appropriate anchor text will give additional weight to a websites ranking. The reason for this is the text used to hyperlink a page of a website tells the search engines about a pages subject.

Keywords and Anchor Text

Search engines take cues from on-page optimization to figure out what a page is focusing on but webmasters should ensure that they have properly optimized internal and external links. To make this determination you should think about what keywords and keyword phrases you are targeting. How do searchers search for the information or products that you provide? Getting into the mind of a potential search visitor will help you to figure out what keywords you should be targeting as well as enabling your site to reach more people.

Creating a great anchor text can take a little thought and creativity. The link text should not be so obscure that nobody ever searches for it but not so common that it is out of the reach of your link building campaign. At one point “How to” and “What is” anchor text was easy to rank. Those days are over. Once websites figured out how easy it was to rank for those long-tail phrases, the internet became rampant with how to guides and wiki-like sites.

Longtail Keyword Anchor Text

When first beginning to rank your page, start with the whole title. The longer your phrase the easier it will be to rank. Once your page is ranking high start you can begin shrinking your anchor text. As a single page develops authority via links, it will be able to rank the shorter phrases easier. A 3-stage process of longest, shorter and shortest anchor text will help to create reasonably quick rankings.

One of the most common SEO mistakes that webmasters make is sending all their incoming links to the home page using their websites title. Send your links to the internal pages and use proper anchor text. This will strengthen the site as a whole. All those links going to the home page will make your website appear stronger but the SEO value is minimal. All the links that you send to your internal pages filter up to the home page anyway so you might as well get the maximum effect for the minimum work.

Anchor text.