The Importance of Including Links as Anchor Text
You know by now that creating links is of vital importance your SEO campaign. There are three main type of links: internal links (that help crawlers to find all of your individual web pages), backlinks (which are links back to you published on another website), and external links, which are links you publish on your site (or on a third party site) leading to another company’s webpage.
Humans Reading Links
However, all of these links mean very little, unless of course you can induce visitors to click on the links, and this refers not only to human visitors but also search engine crawlers. First, consider human editors…
On an ecommerce website, if you are trying to draw attention to a store link, it would be wise for you to setup the link you are encouraging the customer to click. The old days featured links saying “click here”, but in modern times these links do not elicit much of a response. (Guess people are just tired of being told what to do!) On the contrary, setting up the link, as in drawing attention to something specific, is going to encourage them to take action. For example, “Find out more about quantity discounts!” In this anchor text, a human reader immediately sees value in your statement. You have information that he/she wants, and so that user is more inclined to click through.
Search Engines Crawling Links
However, anchor text is not only important for human visitors. Even search engine bots require quality anchor text. It’s not merely an issue of quality content; the anchor text literally tells search engines what the linked site is all about. Therefore, the search engines request that anchor text not only be relevant (and not just a “click here!” statement) but also descriptive of the site. In fact, SEOMoz has actually stated that anchor text is one of the top five important factors in determining rank.
When attempting to creating anchor text, first develop a strategy, perhaps including keyword analysis. It is also a wise move to vary your links, rather than simply cutting and pasting the same keywords over and over again for various links. Sometimes you get better results if you slightly alter your words, add a word, or change a singular word to a plural world.
There can actually be two links, with two sets of anchor texts, in one sentence. For instance, including anchor text that reads, “Google released a statement yesterday concerning the latest Yahoo update….” The anchor text would consider each keyword and each section of anchor text so that readers are only returned the most relevant site.
Remember, anchor text and inbound links represents 95% of effective search engine optimization according to some SEO consultants. Content is king, but all content is intrinsically connected with the links you create and the text you create to describe those all important links. The search engines aren’t going to bother crawling your site for mainstream audiences if your links are not correctly configured.
