What is good anchor text?

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 1:37 pm

What is anchor test? [ 3:42 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today’s question/s also come from comments left. Seems anchor text is confusing. Here are the questions:

what do you good anchor text? what i the best way to get blog ranked into google etc? very good blog very interesting

Mike, I like the idea of using good anchor text in your blog content. However, I notice that someone else has the same question I do, “What is good anchor text?”

Along the same lines, how many links should be added to a blog post? I see that on some of your blogs you only have one link at the end of the post. Is it best to only have one link about the subject of your post, or have many links as you write about the subject?

Okay first a quick definition of anchor text. Again I will be changing the < to [ so that it will be viewable. When you create a hyperlink it looks like this: [a href="yoururlhere"]Go here[/a]. Go here would be the anchor text. That is what will show on the page for that link.

Now why is it important? The search engines use that to help decide what that page is about. Here is a prime example. Do a Google for “click here”. The first result is the download page for Adobe Reader. That web page does not even have the term “click here” on it. There are 1000′s if not 1,000,000′s of pages on line that link to that page with that anchor.

Just about every download page for a pdf links to that site with “click here” to allow their users to get the free reader to read what they just downloaded so Google has that page as the #1 for that term.

Linking out using the keywords you would like to get that page ranked for can be very powerful. That is how you will often see a specific affiliate url ranked fairly high if that person has created a few blog posts and some article submissions linking with that specific anchor text for a particualr keyword. Often times higher than the actual site.

Now the question about the number of links is a bit tougher and really the answer is it depends. Most of the time I try to keep my blog posts very specific. There are a couple of reasons for this. By targeting them they are more likely to rank higher for that keyword and if I am preselling something I only want there to be one option. If you give people more than one choice they usally get confused and do nothing.

There are cases though where that changes and it depends on the post. On my marketing blog I do a week in review post each week. This will have multiple links going out to a variety of things that have entered my inbox that week.

It works well because that post is not trying to work for a specific topic (traffic comes primarily from my email list) and I am creating value for them in helping them sort the wheat from the chaff. Here it works because I am acting as an advisor and giving my opinion and usaully I am just a tipping point. They were inteerested in that particular product and have seen a lot of promos for it and my review tips them over to make a decision.

It would not work if it was tried on all the posts but in that format it can be powerful but only if the people arriving already know, like and trust you. Because this traffic comes from people that I have already built a reationship with it works. It would not work if they weren’t already on my list.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.