Links have always been one of the most critical aspects of the internet. Being able to link multiple related pages together provides a tremendous value to readers.
Back in the pre-Web 2.0 days, a lot of links were written with “click here” as the anchor text (and a lot of people still link like this). While that makes writing the link easy for the author, it is boring and not descriptive. Furthermore, search engines use the text the link is anchored to in order to determine what value the link has. I’m shocked at the number of people I see not using optimized anchored links. Appropriately anchored text is an awesome SEO tool.
Use Anchored Links To Improve Your SEO
If you do a search for “click here,” most of the sites that come up on the first page are popular products like Adobe Reader and Apple Quicktime. That’s because many webpages say “click here” to download this program.
To improve your SERP for specific keywords, anchor your internal links with the keywords you want to rank for. Some people also use these keywords for their name when they comment on other people’s blogs (especially dofollow blogs). In my opinion, not including your name while commenting is against commenting etiquette, but tossing in a keyword or two after your name (“Blake @ Props Blog Reviews” for example) can build you back links with strong text anchors.
Now imagine if everyone who linked to your page anchored the link with keywords you wanted to rank for rather than your blog title (which you probably already rank well for in the first place). Having quality inbound links to your page with strong keyword anchors would quickly help you to rank for terms you’d have a hard time ranking for otherwise.
If you want to help other bloggers in your community (if you are linking to them, you probably want to help them… right?), start anchoring your links to their blog with useful keywords. Even if the keywords aren’t exactly what they are looking for, chances are they are better than “click here” or the title of their blog (unless their blog is strangely called “Make Money From Home”).
While it doesn’t seem like a big deal, over time, it ads up. Links are extremely useful for sharing valuable information; help spread the information faster and use strong anchored links to improve their SEO as well. You’re readers and other bloggers in the community will appreciate it.
Related posts:
November 17th, 2009 at 2:57 PM
So many people don’t understand contextually relevant anchor text, including people that write for huge web sites.
I don’t even care about the SEO benefits. The benefit to the reader are big enough (by far) that it shouldn’t be an issue.
November 17th, 2009 at 9:59 PM
Yeah, anchor text is surely a must if we ant a strong position in search engine.
November 18th, 2009 at 8:14 AM
I agree. I think it makes articles flow so much smoother when you can anchor text instead of using the click here cop out.
You’d never see someone write “click here” in a magazine or a book. Why should we see that on blogs?
November 18th, 2009 at 8:16 AM
That’s one thing I’ve noticed you are very good about on your blog. The technical practices you use on your blog are right on point! You’re going to be at the top of “online knowledge” soon (if you aren’t already)
November 18th, 2009 at 8:33 AM
Keyword anchor text is pretty important. It benefits everyone: allows bloggers to choose keywords for the link, allows readers to understand clearly what they are clicking on, and allows search engines to more easily associate the target content with other relevant content.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:24 PM
Another important information by Blake. Also I want to tell that use keywords in a title of post, it will definitely help to improve SEO.
December 7th, 2009 at 12:36 PM
i always try to optimize my blog posts and links with proper anchor text related to the keywords targeted for the posts. but still i think i need to be more optimizing all posts and actually learning to get better