Working With Anchor Text
Working With Anchor Text
The Anchor Text is the text you see with a standard text link, it may be a different colour or underlined. Take the link below-
The HTML code for which is-
<a href ="http://www.oyster-web.co.uk"> Search Engine Optimisation </a>
The text "Search Engine Optimisation" is the Anchor Text for this text link.
Anchor Text Importance in Search Engine Optimisation
Google results are greatly influenced by the Anchor Text of links to a page. This can be proven by doing an ' allinanchor :keyword ' search in Google (this type of search looks for the sites with that keyword in the anchor text most) and compare the results to a standard 'keyword' search. The results will be similar and on many occasions the order of the first 10 results will match exactly.
As discussed earlier with enough links using the same/similar anchor text a page can rank quite high for that text, even the number one position, without the keyword being used on the page or even in the code!.
Conclusion : Anchor Text is one of the most important factors in achieving good search engine results.
A page about Search Engine Optimisation will rank better if it utilises its keyphrase (Search Engine Optimisation) in the anchor text of incoming links. This also includes internal links from inside the same site! If you do a link search in Google to find which pages are linking to you ( link :www.yourdomain ) the results will include links from pages on the same site/domain. So it makes sense to start your link campaign by ensuring your internal links reflect the targeted keyphrases of the pages they are pointing to.
If your site navigation is based on images or uses terms like 'More Info' you are missing out on a golden opportunity to reinforce the keyphrases of your pages without having to find links from other sites.
Linking to your Index page
It is important to always structure links to your home page in the same fashion to maximize PR and backlink reporting as some search engines will see the following as distinct pages:
- index.html
- www.domain.com/
- http://www.yourdomain.com/
- www.domain.com/index.html
- http://www.domain.com/index.html
Although all the URLs would resolve to the same page the danger is that all those links could be treated as separate pages. This is why it is important that internal links that lead back to the front page use the absolute URL, without the extensions.
http://www.yourdomain.com/
This way search engines will not see different pages and index them all. If it does happen, it can take a while to sort it all out. In the meantime you are spreading the PageRank being passed back by your internal pages over different page extensions which is not a good thing.
There are other advantages to linking back to the homepage without specifying the name of the default document. If your homepage was index.htm but for technical reasons you had to switch to a PHP page you will able to do so without any loss of PageRank. Nor will you need to make any site wide changes as the links always point back to the homepage using the absolute URL. Additionally, if you ensure that everyone who links to you does so using http://www.yourdomain.com/, you will not have to contact any other Web Site owner to ask them to change the link to reflect the new homepage.
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