Using anchor text to increase your listing position for your keywords
What are anchor text? Anchor text are the visible text you see within a link. Take for example:
<a href=”index.html”>Test website</a>
In this case, “Test website” is the anchor text. Anchor text does a few things for your website. They describe the link to the users so they have a fairly good idea what the link is about before landing on the website. But most importantly, search engines will use the keywords within the anchor text to index your website. Search engines love anchor text because the keywords are of high relevance to the linked website.
As a simple test, do a search for “click here” in google. The first page is Adobe Reader website. Now open that site and search using your browser for “click here”. Those keywords are no where to be found for this website. So how can a website where these keywords appear no where within the text get top ranking? Simple! There are lots of websites out there that link to the Adobe Reader website using the anchor text “click here”. Hence, google has associated these keywords with this website. This is prove that you do not have to have your keywords within your website text to be indexed by them.
As another example, search for “failure” using google again. The top ranking website is the President’s website. You can be sure the word “failure” does not appear anywhere in this website, it is simply lots of people linking to this site using the word “failure” within the anchor text. This is described in the google blog, this site has been googlebombed! You may have come across this site in funny emails that are circulated around the web.
In a nutshell, when you are creating backlinks to your website, take some time to work out how you can use the keywords you want to be searched by within the anchor text of these backlinks. It will do you wonders! Don’t just use your website name as the anchor text.
Suppose you have a lingerie store called “IntimateWear”, instead of using this title as your anchor text in your backlinks, maybe something along the lines of “Plus size Australian lingerie store” may do better. Atleast this has “lingerie” and “plus size” which maybe keywords you are expecting your customers to be able to find you with.