Anchor Text – Make Sure You Vary The Text In Your Inbound Links
Jun 10th, 2008 by admin
Last week we discussed the importance of off-page optimisation, and the huge importance inbound links play in seo.
When you consider your inbound linking strategy, there are several factors that will influence how well you rank.
Firstly,the quality of the pages that your links appear on. Ideally, you want links to be placed on high page rank, highly relevant pages.
Secondly, you want your links to be “dofollow” links otherwise they will not pass on page rank. Read this post on “blog commenting” for more details.
Finally, the anchor text used in your links needs to vary, plus the inbound links want to be aimed at all your pages, not just your homepage. Google will get suspicious and penalise your site if all your links have the same anchor text and all point to the same page on your site.
So what is “Anchor Text”?
Anchor text is the text you read when you click on a link on a page. For example, the link above that takes you to my post on blog commenting has the anchor text “blog commenting”.
The html code for a link with anchor text would be:
< a href="http://essentialseotools.com">anchor text< /a >
It’s also important that you use good anchor text in the links between your pages on your own site, make sure they’re keyword rich and targeted.
It’s more important though to ensure that the anchor text used on your inbound links from other people’s pages is keyword rich also. If those links use anchor text containing the keywords that the page they are targeted to is optimised for, the pages will rank better.
Google and the other search engines put a lot of weight on the quality or your inbound links, and on the anchor text used. They also like to see natural linking patterns appear over a period of time.
Ideally you want to try and put in place a linking strategy for each page you produce, that looks like the one in the image above. 50 – 60% of your inbound links should target your main keyword phrase on the page. Then 20 – 30% of your links should target your secondary keyword phrase, with the rest of your links targeting related keywords.
Mixing the anchor text in this way will show the search engines clearly what your page is about, whilst maintaining a natural appearance.
Tomorrow I’ll show you one of the key tools I use to help achieve that kind of anchor text pattern. 
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!