Anchor text

While links provide the semantic structure of the Internet, the description of a link provides context.

Spiders crawl pages and follow the links discovered on those pages – this technique enables them to build a structure of pages and how they relate to each other, separately from how those pages are structured on their own sites. The interlinking of pages forms the semantic structure of the web and is largely responsible for how search engines determine the relevance and value of their results.

You are probably used to seeing links on a page as blue underlined sections of text, and this formatting difference is intended to indicate to the visitor that there’s a link to follow. When you examine the HTML that forms the link “Want to know more about our product? Click here!”, it looks like this:

Want to know more about our product? Click <a href=””http://mysite.com/product.html””>here</a>!

The word “here” in this example is called anchor text, and it’s one of the most significant indicators used by search engines to consider relevance. Consequently, using “here” or “click here” for anchor text is a wasted opportunity to influence search engine rankings, yet it’s one of the most common ways to provide a link. A much better way to link to your pages is use your keywords in your anchor text – for example, “ABC’s Document Storage Services has excellent pricing.”

At its simplest, having many pages pointing to your web page with the same (or similar) keywords reinforces the association between those keywords and your page. Although you don’t have much control over the anchor text used by third-parties referencing your web page, you should ensure that all anchor text under your control reinforces the keywords chosen for your site.

The book covers a range of techniques to create SEO-friendly anchor text throughout your own webpages and third-party inbound links.

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