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The importance of Anchor Text

by admin on February 23rd, 2006

I’m finding more and more articles that emphasize the importance of back link anchor text, meaning the text in your “a href” tags. The anchor text is vital to your keyword plan as Google will give you points if the anchor text is the keyword you are targeting.

Any website marketing plan should include a plan of action for finding link exchanges. Whether it be finding free link exchange sites or paying a SEO company to provide the link exchange program for you. Most SEO companies will suss out websites with similar content to your own and do all the communication for you, creating a network of back links. The choice is yours and really comes down to whether you have a decent sized budget. SEO companies (when picked correctly) can do a fantastic job of creating a solid back link network, which in turn will boost your Page Rank dramatically.

Whichever link exchange method you choose, each will require a URL and “Anchor Text”. With the URL, make sure it’s valid and remember Google treats http://site.com differently to http://www.site.com. Most of my sites have scripts to redirect everything from www.site.com to site.com, meaning only ONE Page Rank.

The Anchor Text should ideally be the primary keyword that you are targeting. Here’s an example where the aim is to get a high search engine placement with the keyword “download kaspersky”.

The URL I want to promote is (http://www.kaspersky.com.au/download-kaspersky/) and the keyword is “download kaspersky”. The details that I provide to the link exchange program will look like this

download kaspersky

So in the end, the link will look like this: download kaspersky

The link exchange program may also require a paragraph containing a short description of your website.

So where can you find a good link exchange forum/site? Here’s a few I’ve used in the past.

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POSTED IN: SEO

6 opinions for The importance of Anchor Text

  • Brian Breslin
    Feb 23, 2006 at 12:36 pm

    Isn’t this often referred to as page slugs?

  • Julian
    Feb 23, 2006 at 3:19 pm

    I think the anchor text should reflect to content of the page you are linking to, so instead of you saying ‘[this article] was pretty good’ you would link to it ‘this [article about bla bla] was great’ :)

  • Jamsi
    Feb 23, 2006 at 5:59 pm

    Not entirely sure what page slugs are Brian.
    And yes Julian, that sounds like solid advice :)

  • Lea
    Feb 24, 2006 at 10:32 pm

    ’slugs’ are the text strings wordpress uses as part of the url, to identify the post.
    So the slug for this post is ‘the-importance-of-anchor-text’
    So, no, anchor strings aren’t slugs, although a slug might appear in the url the anchor text is linking to.
    The slug might be a good guess for what you linkee would like in the anchor text.

  • Jon Henshaw
    May 24, 2006 at 1:21 pm

    Google is smart enough to recognize the difference between www and no http://www. They will only treat it differently if there’s different content at each address.

    Also, it’s not a good idea to do a link campaign with the same anchor text. It’s the surest way to tip off Google that you’re doing a link campaign — instead of getting links organically. A better (smarter) way is to come up with several variations of your anchor text for sites to use during your link campaign.

  • scott
    Nov 14, 2006 at 12:59 am

    Hi,

    I visited your site and liked the contents so would like to propose

    link
    exchange partnership with your site. As you probably already

    know, link
    popularity is a major factor in getting a site noticed by the search

    engines
    and getting traffic onto that site.
    An additional link would help both you and us to get more traffic.

    If you accept this link exchange partnership then place the under

    mentioned
    details in your link page:

    Title: Mortgage Refinance

    URL: http://www.bettermortgagerefinancing.com

    Description: For your total mortgage refinance needs.

    And Let me know when our links are live, send over your

    information and I’ll
    gladly place your link to our following site within 48 hrs.

    Reciprocal link: http://www.cotlerindia.com

    Looking forward to hear from you soon.

    Thanking You!

    Regards,
    scott

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