Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Anchor Text

Anchor Text

Use descriptive anchor text for all your text links. Most search engines consider anchor text of incoming links when ranking pages. Here is an example of anchor:

<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">Anchor Text</a>

Here are following important points to notice about anchors:The Anchor Title plays a very important roles and will be seen by most of the search engines. So your anchor title should have appropriate keywords. Anchor title will help site visitors using a balloon and displaying written text.

The Anchor Text is another important part which should be selected very carefully because this text will be used not only of search engines but also for the navigation purpose. You should try to use best keywords in your anchor text.

The otherpage.htm is the link to another web page. This link could be to external site. But here care should be taken that this web page should exist otherwise it will be called a broken link and broken links give very bad impression to Search Engines as we as to site visitors.

Another example of an anchor could be as follows:


<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">

   <img src="image.gif" alt="keywords" />

</a>

In this case Anchor Text has been replaced by an image. So while using an image in place of anchor text it should be checked that you have put alt tag properly. An image alt tag should have appropriate keywords.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In modern browsers, it is often blue and underlined, such as seo-tutorials-forall

Code Sample

<a href="http://seo-tutorials-forall.blogspot.in/">Example Anchor Text</a>

Optimal Format

SEO-friendly anchor text is succinct and relevant to the target page.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. In the phrase "CNN is a good source of news, but I actually prefer the BBC's take on events," two unique pieces of anchor text exist for two different links: "CNN" is the anchor text pointing to http://www.cnn.com/, while “the BBC's take on events” points to http://news.bbc.co.uk.

Search engines use this text to help determine the subject matter of the linked-to document. In the example above, the links would tell the search engine that when users search for "CNN", Moz.com thinks that http://www.cnn.com/ is a relevant site for the term "CNN" and that http://www.bbc.co.uk is relevant to “the BBC's take on events.” If many sites think that a particular page is relevant for a given set of terms, that page can manage to rank well even if the terms NEVER appear in the text itself.

In the example above, "Jon Wye's Custom Designed Belts" would be the anchor text of this link.

SEO Best Practice

As search engines have matured, they have started identifying more metrics for determining rankings. One metric that stood out among the rest was link relevancy. Link relevancy is determined by both the content of the source page and the content of the anchor text. It is a natural phenomenon that occurs when people link out to other content on the web.

This is most easily understood with an example. Imagine that someone writes a blog about whiteboard markers. Ever inclined to learn more about their passion, they spend part of their day reading what other people online have to say about whiteboard markers. Now imagine that while reading on their favorite topic, the dry erase marker enthusiast finds an article about the psychological effects of marker color choice. Excited, she goes back to her website to blog about the article so her friends can read about it.

When she writes the blog post and links to the article, she gets to choose the anchor text for the link pointing at the article. She could choose something like “click here,” but more likely, she will choose something that it is relevant to the article. In this case, she chooses “psychological effects of marker color choice.” Someone else who links to the same article might use the link anchor text, "marker color choice and its effect on the brain."

This human–powered information is essential to modern-day search engines. The search engines can use it to determine what the target page is about and thus, which queries it should be relevant for. These descriptions are relatively unbiased and produced by real people. This metric, in combination with complicated natural language processing, makes up the lion's share of link relevancy indicators online.

Other important link relevancy indicators are link sources and information hierarchy. For example, the search engines can also use the fact that someone linked to the whiteboard marker article from a blog about whiteboard markers to supplement their algorithm's understanding of the given page's relevancy. Similarly, the engines can use the fact that the original article was located at the URL www.example.com/vision/color/ to determine the high-level positioning and relevancy of the content.

With the Penguin update, Google began to look more closely at keywords in anchor text. If too many of a site's inbound links contain the exact same anchor text, it can start to appear suspicious, and is often a sign that the links weren’t acquired naturally. In general, it’s still a best practice to obtain keyword– and topic–specific anchor text when possible. However, SEOs may get better results by striving for a variety of anchor text rather than the same keyword each time.

Key Points:

If many links point to a page with the right keywords in their anchor text, that page has a very good chance of ranking well. Real examples of this include the search engine result pages for the queries, "click here" and "leave." Many of the Google results for these queries rank solely due to the anchor text of inbound links.
People have a tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either the domain name or the title of the page. This is an advantage to SEOs who include keywords they want to rank for in these two elements.
Too many inbound links to a page with the exact same keyword-rich anchor text may cause Google to scrutinize that site’s link profile more closely; using manipulative methods to acquire keyword–rich anchor text is not recommended.

Importance of the First Anchor Text

Experiments have shown that if two links are targeting the same URL, only the anchor text used in the first link is counted by Google.

More recently, several webmasters have run experiments showing ways to count multiple anchor text phrases contained on the same page and pointing to the same target. This is accomplished by creating anchors on the target page and linking to those anchors using hashtags

<a href="../blog/example-post#jtc142864">Second Anchor Text</a>

Bad anchor text example: Click here!

Good anchor text examples: anchor text, anchor text definition, learn about anchor text

The anchor text is also known as the link label or link title. The words contained in the anchor text helps determines the ranking that the page will receive by search engines such as Google or Yahoo and Bing. Links without anchor texts commonly happen on the web and are called naked URLs, or URL anchor texts. Different browsers will display anchor texts differently, and proper use of anchor text can help the page linked to rank for those keywords in search engines.

Exact Match Anchor Text

An exact match anchor text has the same keywords highlighted as the targeted keyword of a web page.

e.g. An exact match anchor text on this page would be the keyword "anchor text" hyperlinked to http://seo-tutorials-forall.blogspot.in/2014/02/anchor-text.html like so: anchor text.

Anchor Text Variation

When websites aggressively build exact match anchor text links, a Google spam filter is triggered. It is unnatural for web pages that link to your website to all have exact match anchor texts. A bit of anchor text variation is natural, just like how a great portion of the internet's links are naked urls.

e.g. John runs a small dental clinic in Boston. His dental clinic

Anchor Text Manipulation

As a result of being a search engine signal for relevancy, it is possible to SEO anchor text, and hence anchor text manipulation techniques and vocabulary evolved.

Targeted Anchor Text

Linkbuilders, or SEOs specialized in building links to a website, often control the anchor text from the links they build from other websites. These anchor texts are targeted - the keywords in the anchor text will match the targetted keyword the page an SEO is trying to rank on.

Backlink Anchor Text

A backlink is a link from another website. The backlink anchor text is the anchor text used by other website linking to your website. The anchor text of these backlinks help search engines determine the most relevant keywords a web page should rank for.

One-Way Achor Text Backlinks

If website A links to website B with an anchor text backlink and website B does not link back to website A, then you have an one-way anchor text backlink. One-way anchor text backlinks are sought out by SEOs because PageRank juice flows one one domain to another. It is believed that the more one-way anchor text backlinks a web page has from websites with high PageRank, the better they will rank on search engines.

Excessive Anchor Text

Just like keyword stuffing, you can have too much anchor text on a given page. When there are too many keywords on a page linking to too many other pages of a website, or all to the same page but with different anchor texts, you have a case of excessive anchor text. The excessive use of anchor text within your website can lead to Google penalties as it is considered a spammy, user unfriendly practice.

Anchor Text Distribution

Because link builders are actively building links to their website with targeted anchor text, particular keywords will have a higher share of a page's overall anchor text distribution.

Spammy Anchor Text

A spammy anchor text is a link with an anchor text that has no relationship to the page it exists on or the page it is linking to. Spammy anchor texts are a common black hat SEO tactics to either temporarily rank for competitive keywords such as "pay day loans" or "buy viagra" but can also be used as a tool to harm a competitor's website or individual through negative SEO and Google bombing.

Natural Anchor Text Vs Unnatural Anchor Text

When web surfers link to your website, it is inevitable that you will get bad anchor text that do not help identify your web page's topic. However, just like naked URLs, these are natural occurances, and are not frowned upon by search engines. On the flip side, the lack of naked URLs, the excessive use of anchor text, and or a high number of targeted one-way anchor text backlinks are all signs of unnatural anchor text distribution. Search engines like Google may penalize websites that focused on manipulating anchor text when user experience is compromised.

To obtain natural anchor texts to your website, create good content and the links and anchor text.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Friday, February 14, 2014