How to Optimise Anchor Text | Website Anchor Text Selection & Optimisation

Anchor text is another name for clickable link text, and within any web design element is the text used to mask a URL.

Anchor text is used on links to provide information on the page that it links to using short keyword combinations. Anchor text is visibly far better than using URL's for clickable links.

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Anchor text, is a vital part to search engine optimization because of relevancy conveyance. Search engines view the clickable link text, and calculate how relevant the text used on the link is to the destination pages content. This method helps eradicate websites that uses misleading anchor text to attract clicks.

Anchor text comes in many forms, depending on size, style and web technology.

For example, some websites you see may have links in different colours, some links may change colour when clicked or rolled over. Some links might appear on the page based on a tool or application running on a website and much more.

Whatever form the link takes, the text used is absolutely vital.

Search engines use the internal and external anchor text to evaluate the destination pages relevancy. For example, if my car parts page is linked to internally and externally using anchor text relevant to the page, Google, Yahoo and MSN will see this in a positive manner.

Anchor text is used to convey relevancy, like an index, search engines will use the values given to calculate just how relevant the text is. If the text is of poor relevance or is misleading, search engines will devalue the page/website for its SEO merits.

Remember, anchor text is important both within the website and off the website. What this means is that the websites linking back to your website, should use the appropriate anchor text to re-enforce the SEO value of the link.

When Google, Yahoo or MSN crawls a website, they will look at the websites outbound links and the anchor text used, since they assume that a webmaster will naturally link to a website using anchor text based on the websites content, it is this principle that makes anchor text selection important.

So if another website links back to your website using keywords relevant to your website, this will pose as a positive SEO factor that will influence better positions for that keyword.

So we have established that anchor text is important for relativity, so how do we use the right anchor text internally on our website?.

It is very easy to use the right anchor text, but it means that the anchor text assigned should be the keywords that the destination page is designated to rank for. Using anchor text that deviates from the destination pages content or title will cause relevancy issues.

Remember the following rule:

ANCHOR TEXT | TITLE TAG | PAGE CONTENT

These 3 items need to be as relative as possible; any discrepancies will have a negative impact on a websites SEO campaign.

Ok, so for an example page, lets use Free Movies Online, our website might be www.free-movies-online.org

If we have a selection of pages, we would want to link them using the appropriate anchor text,

If we linked from our VHS Videos page to the Free Movies Online page we would want to use the core keywords between both pages.

As you can see above, both pages link to each other using optimal anchor text. The anchor text was selected because of the pages title and content.

Every page on your website that is unique will have its own keyword group. Select the most important keyword from each page and make it the anchor text that is used whenever the page is referenced.

IT IS VITAL THAT PAGES KEEP THE SAME ANCHOR TEXT INTERNALLY, DO NOT USE DIFFERENT ANCHOR TEXTS FOR THE SAME LINK!!!!

Referencing a page using different anchor texts on the same URL from different pages can cause all sorts of problems for a website.

When you have selected the anchor text for a page, make sure any other page in the website linking back to that page uses the same anchor text.

When selecting anchor text, try to avoid making the anchor text to long. Although this may seem like a good idea, it will dilute the pages values and will give the page a long tail relation.

Anchor text should range between 1 and 5 words at the most.

Anchor text should not be too similar between pages, this can cause relevancy issues or supplemental results. Make sure if you have 2 pages very similar, that one of the pages is given the meta instruction to be ignored by a search engine.

Tips for Optimal Anchor Text:

1. Keep anchor text between 1-5 keywords in length

2. Use the target pages best keyword

3. Don't use different anchor texts for the same page internally

4. Do not duplicate anchor text on other pages

5. Make sure the anchor text used is kept unique

6. Avoid using special characters such as ()[],'#@~ and any other non text based character

7. Avoid stop words in anchor text such as "AND, OR, NOT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, HOW, IF, BUT" etc.

8. Avoid using javascript to dynamically generate anchor text

Use the above tips in order to generate anchor text for your website.

You can learn more about this by visiting:

http://www.assertive-media.co.uk/anchor-text.html