SEO Company, SEO Nottingham

Anchor Text for Keyword Rankings

You probably know that the number of external links effects your search engine rankings but do you know the importance of what those links say?

The ‘anchor text‘ is the text displayed on an a link for example here is a link to RealWebSEO.com with the anchor text “SEO Nottingham”: SEO Nottingham

The text on a link can be set to anything you like, bad examples of internal of external links are:

- Image Links (as seen on many navigation bars)
- Links that have un-descriptive anchor text such as “Click here”
- Links within a large list of links with no surrounding content

Google looks at anchor text and uses it as a ranking factor for when that keyword is searched for.  If you had 10,000 links from many other websites with the word “Free Jam” on the anchor text for example then you could be sure to rank highly when people type in “Free Jam” into Google!

Anchor text can be so powerful that the keywords within the anchor text don’t even need to be on the landing page of the website for it to get ranked. George Bush fell victim to a ‘GoogleBomb’ of the anchor text “Miserable Failure” where his personal profile came up when “Miserable Failure” was searched for in Google.  Don’t believe me? Here is BBC’s report on George Bushes Anchor Text Mishap.

So if you are doing SEO and gaining external links then make sure you get your main keywords into the anchor text.  An even better method is linking to the specific pages or categories on your website with the appropriate anchor text, you may even see the internal page appear in the keyword search instead of your homepage.

One of our clients SunglassesSave.com sells SunGlasses which has an average of 1.5 Million exact searches locally per month shown below:

We have created hundreds of thousands of external links to the homepage alone with the anchor text “sunglasses” and recently SunglassesSave.com have leaped to position #4 for their main keyword!  If all these links had the anchor text “Click here for Sunglasses” for example then it wouldn’t be nearly as high in Google’s results.

So the key is to get not only as many links as possible to your site but to make sure the anchor text is targeted towards your main keyword too.

There is a future issue to consider with external links… placement and surrounding content.

Evidence shows that Google is looking at text surrounding a link as well as the anchor itself.  If the link is surrounded within related content then it will be more powerful that if it was say in a blogroll or footer bar.  This makes links from news articles and large blogs even more valuable, they have massive amounts of SEO power, few out-bound links and content rich pages and categories surrounding the links.

Placement of the link may also be a factor in Google.  Links at the top of the page in theory would get clicked more often than say footer or sidebar links so I could image site-wide footer links being demoted in the near future, we’ll have to see!

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