Optimizing Your Anchor Text

Most bloggers know the importance of building backlinks to their posts and blog, but many aren’t fully taking advantage of many of the links they develop because they aren’t optimizing their anchor text. The anchor text is simply the actual text that is used for the link. It gets the name “anchor text” because it sits between the anchor tags of the link’s HTML coding.

So, what does make a good anchor text? You want to do your best to include your targeted keyword(s) in the link text whenever possible. Avoid keyword stuffing that results in unnatural sounding text, but if you can use the keywords, go for it. When the search engines find these backlinks to your blog, they will associate the blog with the anchor text and this will boost your rankings in the search engines for these terms.

My favorite way to create great text links is to write the text as if there was no link at all. Then I go back and add the link into the text and anchor it with the most relevant term in the text that I wrote. This method helps to ensure that the content of the page is as natural as possible. Search engines love natural looking links.

One of the most common mistakes that is made is to use action statements like “click here” or “visit the website” as the anchor text for a link. This sort of link can still help pass PageRank to your page, but it won’t do much in terms of moving your page up in the search rankings. Try to put the link on the more descriptive words, not on the actions.