Thursday, April 5, 2012

Anchor Text and SEO

Anchor text is a fundamental part of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

When used in this context, anchor text is a specialized keyword phrase. So what is anchor text? Anchor text is the visible (to the user) part of a link on a web page. Anchor text is the part of the page the user clicks on to get to the website.

Search engines heavily weight anchor text in the search engine algorithms. That means that the keyword phrase used in the anchor text is what the search engine thinks the new web page is all about. For instance, if you are trying to promote a florist shop that is located in Brooklyn, using the name of the shop has less value than using anchor text that is the same as what you think people might type into a search engine to find your flower shop. So rather than using "Acme Flower Shop" as the anchor text, "flowers in Brooklyn" will be a more productive anchor text for a hyperlink to the website.

A good example of anchor text is then:

We needed to send something for her birthday, so we looked for a florist shop that would deliver flowers in Brooklyn.

This causes the search engines to think the website is about "flowers in Brooklyn". So now when a user types "flowers in Brooklyn" into a search engine, there is a chance this website will appear in the results page, because anchor text is highly weighted by the search engine algorithms.

In this example "flowers in Brooklyn" is the anchor text and the website is "flowersinbrooklyn.com". As you can see the website name itself is the same keywords as the anchor text. While a coincidence in this case, the website name was chosen to have higher SEO value than www.acmeflowershop.com would have.

To create anchor text with Blogger, use the "Link" button in the toolbar.

To advance your web page's SEO, link to the page using appropriate anchor text.

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