Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Anchor Text

When external websites link to your business’s website, how the links are shown can be as important as the number of links from the same site. The anchor text or visible text of a hyperlink can provide context to search engines for the content of the webpage on the other side of the hyperlink.

 Link relevancy is becoming more important to search engines and what information people are getting from your content and what they are mentioning plays an important role in how useful or relevant search engines see your website. The anchor text used when linking to your website can be useful when trying to determine what information people are getting from your content. In addition, the anchor text can give a boost to your rankings if the keywords you are aiming to rank for are included in the anchor text. Google and other search engines discourage the manipulation of anchor text on external websites. Google for instance started to give more importance to keywords in anchor text since the Penguin update. 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. They want to keep internet content as unbiased as possible and make sure that their rankings are  consistent with public opinion. There are natural ways that you can influence the probable anchor text that will be used when linking to your website. Setting up your webpages to encourage certain text to be used as links is one way. Many people use the title of your webpage as the anchor text or the domain name of your website. Keep this in mind when creating the title of a new article or webpage. In addition, you can create beneficial anchor text within your own website that can lend some. if not as much, weight for keyword rankings. Use descriptive text in the link in the menu bar and when linking between pages on your website. One word of note, according to research done by Moz, only the first instance of a link to a specific page is given weight by Google. So if using a menu bar at the top of the page, any link in the content to a page contained in the menu will be diminished by the link in the menu. Anchor text has become an important indicator of link relevance for link building. Keep these tips and factors in mind when creating content or optimizing your webpages. We have great experts here at Dallas SEO Dogs if you want to enlist any of our services to help un-bury your website in search engine listings.