Why Is The Anchor Text So Vital To Search Engines?
The anchor text is the linking content in a hyperlink. The words in the anchor text can greatly affect your search engine ranking. Anchor text is at times called the link label. While anchor text is not necessarily related to the link’s actual text, it is more useful to readers if it is. So be sure that such text links are relevant to the destination’s content. If search engines can figure out the topic of your page by the anchor text, they will improve your ranking in search results.
Therefore, careful use of anchor text can increase the number of hits your pages receive. Avoid the common mistake of using “click here” as your link text, since search engines do not get any relevant information. Text backlinks direct traffic to your pages. Sometimes backlinks are dubbed inbound links. Top ten Google results can include pages that are not using the search phrase on the destination page. This is widely known as “Google bombing” (or simply link bombing). Some of these link bombs are pranks, such as the famous 2003 Googlebomb pointing searchers to the White House page for President George W. Bush — as the number one result when anyone typed in the phrase “miserable failure.” Link bombs boosted the rankings of those who use humorous phrases as backlinks to win a high ranking. The least used phrases result in higher ranking whenever it is searched. On the other hand, a common phrase will generate page after page of search results.
However, Google announced in January 2007 that upgrades in its search display process have lessened the amount of “Google bombing”. You can help other sites link to your pages by giving sample code to place in the HTML on their pages. This way, you will be picking your own anchor text. But be careful — if your site is all about learning Spanish, you will not want to have “learn Spanish” as the phrase in every link to your site. This creates another kind of problem, called “over-optimizing.” If you use to much of the same keywords, the search engines may penalize you for keyword stuffing or spamming. On the other hand, most search engines, and especially Google, rank websites higher, if they have numerous high-quality backlinks.
Two examples of quality backlinks are:
1) optimized search phrases pointing back to your site
2) The content on the site pointing to yours covers the same topic
When creating a site, here are some excellent tactics available to use anchor text links:
1) Have links from external web pages
2) Internal links inside your website
3) Links from your site’s default page, website navigation in particular
Finally, keep in mind that you are going to have your content read by live individuals, not just search engines, so the phrases in your anchor text links must make sense to readers, in order to be useful to them, and thus to bring you more visitors.
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