The anchor text is the words that you click on in a hyperlink. The words in the anchor text can have a good or bad effect on your search engine ranking. There is another term for anchor text: the link label. While anchor text might not concern 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, you will be listed higher in search results.
Therefore, the better the anchor text, the higher the number of hits your pages receive. Do not use “click here” as your link label, since it hardly ever provides search engines with relevant information. Text backlinks lead others to your pages. Occasionally backlinks are termed inbound links. Web pages may end up listed in the top ten Google listing even though they are not using the search phrase on the destination page. Such activity is called as “Google bombing” (or simply link bombing). Some of these link bombs are pranks, such as the famous 2003 Googlebomb leading visitors to the White House page for President George W. Bush — as the highest search result when anyone typed in the phrase “miserable failure.” Link bombs aided writers who use humorous phrases as backlinks to win a high ranking. Less common phrases will lead to higher listings whenever it is searched. On the other hand, a word that is quite common will return several pages of search results.
However, Google announced in January 2007 that it had greatly reduced anchor text “Google bombing,” due to improvements in the process it uses to display results. You can help other sites link to your pages by giving sample code to place in the HTML on their pages. This way, you can select the best link text. But be careful — if your site is all about pink doodads, then don’t just use “pink doodads” as the phrase in every link to your site. Exercise care when doing this as it can cause “over-optimizing.” If you overuse your search terms, the search engines may penalize you for keyword stuffing or spamming. On the other hand, most search engines, and especially Google, allow for high result rankings for high-quality backlinks.
Two examples of quality backlinks are:
1) optimized keywords linking to your website
2) The backlinking website is relevant to yours
When designing your web site, here are some excellent tactics available to use anchor text links:
1) Use links that originate outside your site
2) Internal links within your own site
3) Links from your site’s home page, particularly site maps
Finally, keep in mind that you are speaking to live human beings, not just search engines, so the phrases in your anchor text links seem sensible to readers, in order to be useful to them, and thus to increase your site’s traffic.
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