When determining which keywords your site should be shown for and how high you should be ranked, one of the variables the search engines analyse are the keywords used in the anchor text.
By using the anchor text in links coming to you from other sites AND the links connecting your site’s pages (which means you have some control over this) the search engines are able to build up a picture of your site’s subject and your ‘authority’ in that field.
Anchor text and SEO
When you link from one page to another in your own website or you link to someone else’s website using non-descriptive terms such as ‘click here’ or ‘find out more’ as the anchor text you are not providing the search engine’s spiders with information about what that page is about. As a result you miss out on taking advantage of one of the most important SEO ranking factors (see what I did there?).
To see this in action follow this link which shows how Adobe tops the rankings for the search term “click here” without a single mention of it anywhere on the page (the same goes for all the sites on the first page). This is 100% down to thousands of websites using something along the lines of “To download Adobe Acrobat Reader click here”.
Anchor text and usability
Getting into good habits naming your anchor text also improves your site’s general usability. Research conducted in to how people read online content shows people don’t, they scan. Visitors look for visual cues as to the page’s topic and what they need to do next. Linked text stands out and draws the eyes, but non-descriptive links tell the user nothing and they will continue scanning elsewhere.
Getting the best of both worlds
At Heart Internet when we link to another page we use descriptive keywords for both the reader’s benefit and for our SEO. For example…
“Heart Internet, the UK’s leading provider of Reseller Web Hosting, is pleased to announce the launch of Windows Reseller Hosting.”
Anchor text tips
When you are linking to a page make sure they are…
- Descriptive
- Short
- Written for the user and not the search engines
- Part of the sentence and not tacked on at the end
Laughed my socks off at Adobe’s use of “click here” as driver to their site. I almost never use “click here”, but I will be more careful in future to put in meaningful text. Good article.